How to use salt as noob?

[J. Eppler]

Hello,

Qubes 3.1 comes with salt, a management engine. This is nice, but what is the
advantage for a user. How can I use salt in Qubes if I don't want to start writing
my own moduls, grains etc.? Where is the advantage as Qubes user without
learning salt first? What commands can I use as salt noob?

Is there any advantage in using salt over using the command line?

Best regards
  J. Eppler

[Andrew David Wong]

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Good questions. Tracking this documentation issue here:

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1983

For reference, here's the current Salt documentation:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/salt/

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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For your own, single machine and configurations designed yourself - not
much. All that is possible using command line tools and GUI tools.
The main use case is to easily *replicate* configuration - prepare
salt formula once and apply it easily in many places. Creating salt
formulas requires some understanding of salt. But applying it - not.

Example use cases:

1. Whonix:
There is quite lengthy installation instruction:
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes/Install
When turned into salt formulas[1][2], it can be applied with a single
checkbox during installation, or later with simply enabling those
formulas (we're working on GUI for this):
sudo qubesctl top.enable qvm.anon-whonix
sudo qubesctl state.highstate

2. Martus:
Michael researched and prepared installation instruction:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1836#issuecomment-213575740
Much simpler than Whonix installation, but still requires some manual
steps. Converted to salt formula here:
https://gist.github.com/marmarek/29f9a4a1f3a7a457cf2b449ab0b0e2f4
Will be possible to apply it much easier.


[1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-mgmt-salt-dom0-virtual-machines/blob/master/qvm/sys-whonix.sls
[2] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-mgmt-salt-dom0-virtual-machines/blob/master/qvm/anon-whonix.sls

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[Andrew David Wong]

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Thank you, Marek. This explanation and these examples are exactly the
sort of thing we need to add to the Salt documentation to make it
comprehensible to users:

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1983

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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