salt-confd 2022.11.0

Lightweight Salt package for confd-style management of local application configuration files

Lightweight Salt package à la confd management of local application configuration files.

Why

Please note that the intent of this software package is not to compete against confd or other popular equivalents; it was born purely out of my personal preference / bias of using Salt for managing files (and others). Salt is typically at the opposite end of “lightweight” and this package aims to alleviate this, however it still cannot get better than confd - from this perspective. Alas, it’s written in Python (please let’s not have this discussion over here 😄).

In short, here’s why I took this approach:

• Why not? It’s fun.

• I like Salt, and it offers a variety of well-known templating languages to manage the files, including Jinja, Mako, Cheetah, or even pure Python - and others. In other words, I find that I prefer to use something I’m already comfortable with, particularly in environments where Salt is already a requirement.

• What I find missing in confd is the possibility to manage the local config files based on more environment parameters - e.g., have idempotent templates that can be used across a number of distributions (as in opposite to having separate files / directory tree / or even repositories for different base operating system distribution); with Salt, this can be very easily done using the Grains.

• Not only local templates: it often happens to have your template on a server elsewhere; at the end of the day, you need the resulting config file, not its source. With Salt Confd, you can use source files directly available via HTTP, S3, SWIFT, SVN, or FTP.

• Salt covers a large variety of backends to fetch the data from (including Redis, Vault, Consul, etcd, and so on).

• Salt is easily extensible (not by forking the project), but in your own environment by simply putting the module for your backend of choice under a specific path.

  Or, to put this differently, if you need a different backend, or an additional feature, you won’t need to fork the entire project and re-compile it; instead, you can preserve the existing usage and just provide it with your own code implementing the feature or backend you need.

Installation

$ pip install salt-confd