Installing SALT Stack – the easy way

Use the SALT Bootstrap to auto detect your version of the OS and apply the necessary repo needed for your server

SALT in my opinion is a Linux admins best friend. SALT is what I find to be one of the best free configuration management systems for Linux that is out there compared to Chef and Puppet. Unique features of SALT include the live queries, easy dynamic configuration of clients, and parallel execution. It is much easier to also establish your recipe or profile for servers based on a simple YAML format.

I could go on about SALT, but I will say that installing SALT can be a convoluted process when you look at their installation page. Granted it is more thorough and specific, but wouldn’t it be awesome to utilize a script to do the hard work for you?

Drumroll… There is actually a bootstrap install script to help with the install process and its extremely easy and is practically full proof on scripted deployments.


1) Use CURL to grab the script

curl -L https://bootstrap.saltstack.com -o install_salt.sh

2) To install your SALT MASTER sofware simply run

sudo sh install_salt.sh -P -M -N

3) To install SALT for your SALT MINIONS run
sudo sh install_salt.sh -P

 

Obviously there is a lot to how you configure your SALT master and minions, but we will cover that in another post.