Using Heist For Salt

This tutorial will go over how to set up Heist to manage ephemeral Salt Minions. The whole point of Heist is to make deployment and management of Salt easy!

Before you start please be advised that a more detailed quickstart is available in the docs for heist.

Using Heist is very easy, Start by downloading Heist. Just install via pip:

pip install heist

Setting up a Salt Master

Don’t worry, this is a snap! Once Heist is installed you will need a Salt Master to connect to. If you have an existing Salt Master running you can skip this section, just run heist on your Salt Master.

Download the all-in-one Salt binary for Linux or Mac (Windows coming soon!):

For Linux:

wget https://repo.saltstack.com/salt-bin/linux/salt

For Mac:

wget https://repo.saltstack.com/salt-bin/osx/salt

Now you can just run it!

chmod +x salt
sudo ./salt master

Now you have a running Salt Master to control your minions!

Making Your Roster

A Roster is a file used by Heist to map login information to the systems in your environment. This file can be very simple and just needs to tell Heist where your systems are and how to log into them via ssh. Open a file called roster.cfg and add the data needed to connect to a remote system via ssh:

system_name:
  host: 192.168.4.4
  username: fred
  password: freds_password

The roster files typically all live inside of a roster directory. But to get started will will execute a single roster file with heist:

heist -R roster.cfg

Assuming your roster is correct, heist will now connect to the remote system, deploy a salt minion, and connect it to your running master! Now you can use the same binary that you started the master with to accept your new minion’s keys:

./salt key -A

Then give your minion a few seconds to authenticate and then run your first salt command on the newly set up minion:

./salt \* test.version

Thats it! Now that the minion is up you can run salt commands on it at breakneck speed, the full power of Salt is at your fingertips!!