Is it possible to provision with Saltstack in a masterless configuration?

[ghost]

I managed to created a Digital Ocean droplet with Terraform, and now I would like to provision it with Salt, ideally in a masterless configuration using the same .sls files used to provision the development machine. With Vagrant this is rather trivial, with Terraform however it seems to be much less straightforward. Terraform's documentation regarding provisioners is mute on this subject. I couldn't find any reference on how to invoke Salt to provision an instance.

In Vagrant, it's simply a question of declaring the provisioner in the Vagrantfile, like this:

config.vm.provision :salt do |salt|
salt.minion_config = "salt/minion"
salt.run_highstate = true

And afterwards, it just a question of creating a state tree pointing to our state files, where we declare the packages we would like our machine to be provisioned with, the files that we would like to sync, etc. Is it even possible to do anything similar in Terraform?

[jen20]

Hi @pierrebonbon! Currently there is no explicit support for Salt, or in fact for any configuration management tool other than Chef. However, you can probably make use of the file and remote-exec provisioner here to execute Salt as necessary - I'm not familiar enough with it to suggest the exact contents of the script though! A quick google suggests something like http://ahus1.github.io/saltconsul-examples/tutorial.html (untested and unverified) might be suitable. Thanks for opening the issue - please feel free to reopen if you have further questions on this!

[ghost]

Hi @jen20, thank you for the reply and the link. Any chance that Terraform will offer explicit support for Salt in the near future?

[ghost]

solution here

[sevagh]

Hello. As a heavy user of both Terraform and Salt I'd like to take a stab at writing and contributing a salt-masterless provisioner upstream.

Could I get some tips on how to proceed?

I have been looking at https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/tree/master/provisioner/salt-masterless for inspiration.

Is there a mailing list to discuss large PRs? Or should I go ahead and submit a PR when it's semi-functional?

[sevagh]

#14720

[github-actions]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.
If you have found a problem that seems similar to this, please open a new issue and complete the issue template so we can capture all the details necessary to investigate further.