soluble 0.1.0

Set up a dissolvable, ephemeral salt minion using salt-ssh

Soluble is a tool for setting up, managing, and tearing down ephemeral Salt minions on remote systems using a streamlined Python-based approach. It simplifies the deployment of temporary nodes that can execute Salt commands and clean up afterward, making it ideal for transient infrastructure needs.

About

Soluble is designed to replace the discontinued Heist project by SaltStack/VMware/Broadcom, which aimed to streamline the deployment of ephemeral nodes with Salt. Soluble leverages salt-ssh for setting up and tearing down temporary Salt minions, allowing users to execute Salt commands on these minions before safely removing them. The entire process is managed by a Python script, ensuring ease of use, flexibility, and integration with existing Python-based infrastructure.

What is POP?

This project is built with pop, a Python-based implementation of Plugin Oriented Programming (POP). POP seeks to bring together concepts and wisdom from the history of computing in new ways to solve modern computing problems.

For more information:

• Intro to Plugin Oriented Programming (POP)

• pop-awesome

• pop-create

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+

• git (if installing from source, or contributing to the project)

• SaltStack installed on the master node

• salt-ssh and salt-key commands available

Installation

Note

If wanting to contribute to the project, and setup your local development environment, see the CONTRIBUTING.rst document in the source repository for this project.

If wanting to use soluble, you can do so by either installing from PyPI or from source.

Install from PyPI

If package is available via PyPI, include the directions.

pip install soluble

Install from source

# clone repo
git clone git@<your-project-path>/soluble.git
cd soluble

# Setup venv
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Usage

Soluble is designed to simplify the process of setting up ephemeral Salt minions, running commands, and then cleaning up those minions. Here’s a basic usage example:

# Example usage of soluble.py
./soluble.py -r /path/to/roster -m /path/to/minion.conf 'state.highstate' -- -c /etc/salt --verbose

In this example: - The -R flag specifies the path to the roster file for salt-ssh. - The –minion-config flag specifies the minion configuration template. If not provided, it defaults to /etc/salt/minion. - The first positional argument (state.highstate) is the Salt command to be executed on the ephemeral minions.

Examples

Here are a few more examples of how you can use Soluble:

# Install a package on ephemeral nodes
soluble minion '*' 'pkg.install vim'

# Apply a state file
soluble '*' 'state.apply my_state'

# Ping minions
soluble minion '*' 'test.ping'

Roadmap

Reference the open issues for a list of proposed features (and known issues).

The project roadmap includes: - Expanding support for additional Salt modules and functions. - Enhancing error handling and logging for more robust operation. - Integration with other infrastructure management tools.

Acknowledgements

• Img Shields for making repository badges easy.