Bootstrapping salt on new hosts

[Jeff Abrahamson]

In the docs I see some very nice instructions on hand-setup of salt, but
I haven't found any advice on best practice for automated host-up
scripts.  So this is kind of a reality check if what I'm doing is
totally missing something or more or less on target.

We've historically been using fabric for host orchestration.  So I've a
new fabric target, salt_host_up(), that assumes the host exists, has an
ubuntu image deployed, and has DNS and reverse DNS but nothing else. 
The function remote executes the following on my new host:

    add salt-stack gpg key
    create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/saltstack.list
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install salt-minion
    copy a file to /etc/salt/minion
    service salt-minion restart

and then remote executes on the server

    accept the new key on the master
    sudo salt 'the-new-host' state.highstate

That last bit I'm a bit unclear on, since I haven't quite figured out
how to securely automate accepting the new minion key.  So that's manual
for now.  (And, anyway, I'm describing something I'm still working on,
so maybe I missed a detail.)

Is there a better way?

--

Jeff Abrahamson
+33 6 24 40 01 57
+44 7920 594 255

http://p27.eu/jeff/

[Sjoerd Oostdijck]

On a fresh box you can run the salt bootstrap script from here:
https://github.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap

Then what I do is call salt-api to register my new minion with the
master. Since I’m using centos I’ve got this scripted in the post
install of my anaconda installation.

See here for some info:
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/netapi/all/salt.netapi.rest_cherrypy.html#key

Good luck,
-Sjoerd.

Sjoerd Oostdijck
Senior Systems Engineer - RIPE NCC

[Jeremy McMillan]

Saltify would do what you're currently using fabric to do. This works best when you have a known enumeration of IP addresses and hostnames and/or minion ids that you can use to drive saltify.

https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/cloud/saltify.html

There's also cloud-init support for automatically installing OS packages for salt at first boot time if your OS images have cloud-init. This works best when you're creating VMs via a salt orchestration job that can pre-seed the minion keys for cloud-init.

http://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/modules.html#salt-minion