Need guidelines in salt structure organisation

[Plup]

Hi guys,

I'm new to salt and I'm migrating from Ansible.
I try to organise my configs and I would like to have your opinion about the best salty way to do it.

I want to deploy apps with salt.

Each app is defined by a set of parameters :

myapp1:
    domain: myapp1.example.com
    repository: github.com/plup/myapp1

myapp2:
    domain: myapp2.example.com
    repository: github.com/plup/myapp2

And each app has one profile (django, nodejs,...) which is configured in a state file profile/init.sls (simplified for the example) :

deploy {{ app }}:
  cmd.run:
    - name: 'echo I\'m deploying {{ app }}'
  file.managed:
    - name: '/tmp/{{ app }}.conf'
    - source: 'salt://{{ slspath }}/tmpl.j2'
    - template: jinja

With the template file profile/tmpl.j2 :

You will find the source code of {{ app }} at {{ repository }}

 And now I would like to deploy my applications with something like that:

salt '*' state.apply myapp1

salt '*' state.apply myapp2

I tried to use macro defining app parameters in myappX.sls files and calling the macro fonction from profile/init.sls. But it doesn't work with the variables in the template file.

I tried to use pillar to configure apps but as the entrypoint of deploy command is the profile/init.sls I didn't find a way to pass app specific parameters to the state file.

And now, I'm stuck. Any idea would by appreciated.

[James Young]

You actually can us pillars for this using pillar.get(), look at the below example: 

Pillar setup: 

/srv/pillar/top.sls:

base:
   "*":
      - myApp

/srv/pillar/myApp.sls:

myapp1:
    domain: myapp1.example.com
    repository: github.com/plup/myapp1

Using this data in a state: 

echo the domain is, {{ pillar.get('myapp1').get('domain') }}:
   cmd.run

So long as the pillar is applied, your state will be able to utilize its information at execution time. Hope that helps!

[Loren Gordon]

Another trick, use the salt module for pillar, rather than the .get() dictionary function, and you can specify a key at any point in the dictionary more directly using a colon as a delim... i.e. `salt.pillar.get('myapp1:domain')` rather than `pillar.get('myapp1').get('domain')`...