salt-sandbox

Salt Sandbox is a multi-VM Vagrant-based Salt development environment used for creating and testing new Salt state modules outside of your production environment. It's also a great way to learn firsthand about Salt and its remote execution capabilities.

Salt Sandbox will set up three separate virtual machines:

salt.example.com - the Salt master server
minion1.example.com - the first Salt minion machine
minion2.example.com - the second Salt minion machine

These VMs can be used in conjunction to segregate and test your modules based on node groups, top file environments, grain values etc. You can even test modules on different Linux distributions or release versions to better match your production infrastructure.

Requirements

To use Salt Sandbox, you must have the following items installed and working:

Salt Sandbox has been designed for and tested with Vagrant base boxes running:

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

Usage

Make sure you have a compatible Vagrant base box (if you don't have one already, it will download a 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 box for you), and then you should be good to clone this repo and go:

$ vagrant box list
precise64       (virtualbox)
$ git clone git://github.com/tlyng/salt-sandbox.git
$ cd salt-sandbox

Initial Startup

To bring up the Salt Sandbox environment, issue the following command:

$ vagrant up

The following tasts will be handled automatically:

The Salt master daemon will be installed and enabled on the master machine.
The srv directory will be mounted as /srv on the master.
The Salt minion daemon will be installed and enabled on all minions.
A private network will be set up with all machines knowing how to communicate with each other.
The minion public keys will be automatically accepted by the master server.
Minions will run state.highstate when initialized.

All of this is handled using Vagrant's provisioning capabilities and is controlled by the configs in the salt/ directory. State tree and pillars are available in the srv/ folder.

Developing new modules

To start developing a new SLS modules, just create the standard module structure under srv/salt/ in your salt-sandbox checkout. This directory is automatically in the Salt master's file_roots path and any changes will be picked up immediately.

$ mkdir -p srv/salt/mymodule
$ vim srv/salt/mymodule/init.sls

To have your module actually applied to one or more of the minions, edit the top.slsfile and specify how it should be used during state exectuion.

Check your handiwork

To log on to the virtual machines and see the result of your Salt modules, just use standard Vagrant Multi-VM Environment commands, and provide the proper VM name (master, minion1 or minion2):

$ vagrant ssh master

Then instruct all minions to execute a highstate call and apply any applicable modules:

[vagrant@master ~]$ sudo salt '*' state.highstate

License

Salt Sandbox is provided under the terms of The MIT License.