This post talks about doing various operations using SaltStack and Python. If you are looking for the basics, please refer here. ramaseshan.github.io/technology/2015/04/02/saltstack-and-python/
A basic ls command example
import salt.client
client = salt.client.LocalClient()
client.cmd('*','cmd.run',['ls'])
and the output would be :
"{'Seshan@fractalio': 'Desktop\nDocuments\nDownloads\nMusic\nPictures\nPublic\nTemplates\nVideos\ntest'}"
What does the above code do ? The above code in the terminal is executed as
salt '*' cmd.run ls
Lets look at the various components of the code.
- client is the LocalClient object.
- '\*' -- tells to target this command at all the minions. You can replace the * with things like '192.168.1.20\*' which will target all the minions with key 20*. This is called gobbling. SaltStack also supports regular expressions.
- cmd.run -- this is a salt module, that is used to run a command in the terminal and get the specified output from the client. Eg of other modules, test.ping, state.highstate etc.
- ['ls'] is the parameter or the command that is to be passed to cmd.run. Other examples are, "service network restart" or any command that you execute can be a parameter.
So what happens when you want to pass a parameter to ls ?? then you can say ,
client.cmd('*','cmd.run',['ls','/tmp']).
Most of the things you can accomplish by the above, but have a list of all the available modules in saltstack here : http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/
I am sure you would have also heard about grains in SaltStack. If you want to target minions by the grains, then here is what you have to do.
client.cmd('roles:primary', 'cmd.run', ['ls'], expr_form='grain')
So instead of using '*', we use the grain key and value, and say explicitly that the expr_form='grain'.