Adding Salt broker plugin

[Gerard Hickey]

Good afternoon,

I have just started recently looking at and playing with Hanlon. It is very similar to something I have been wanting to build for a while and similar to a provisioning system used a previous employment. That one was different in implementation and some of the concepts, but it too used a microkernel approach for discovery and deployment tasks.

While starting to play with Hanlon and getting used to it, I got around to looking at the broker slice. Not seeing a SaltStack broker, I figured Hanlon could use one. So I started coding and have an initial version thrown together (actually started with the Puppet plugin and extended from there). I should be starting testing of it in the next day or two.

So I wanted to start a discussion to see if there is anyone out there that has any thoughts on this topic. I figure it would be good to get any other requirements included while the code is being worked on.

What I have so far is a port of the Puppet plugin. The plugin still prompts for server and version of Salt (it will take the standard salt version definitions e.g. stable, stable 2015.5, daily, testing, git develop, etc.), but I have also included a prompt for environment. The plugin will then generate an install script just like the Puppet plugin. This script will pull down the latest Salt bootstrap script and then execute it to install Salt. Basic configuration will be put in place given the options supplied to the plugin and create a /etc/salt/minion.d/id.conf file. At which point the salt-minion service will be started and the rest should be automatic.

If others have any thoughts on installing and configuring Salt, I would love to hear them.

Thanks.
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Gerard Hickey