Salt Super-Proxy
Salt plugin for interacting with network devices, without running Minions.
Note
This is NOT a SaltStack product.
This package may eventually be integrated in a future version of the official Salt releases, in this form or slightly different.
Install
Install this package where you would like to manage your devices from. In case you need a specific Salt version, make sure you install it beforehand, otherwise this package will bring the latest Salt version available instead.
The package is distributed via PyPI, under the name salt-sproxy
.
Execute:
pip install salt-sproxy
Documentation
The complete documentation is available at https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
Quick Start
See this recording for a live quick start:
In the above, minion1
is
a dummy
Proxy Minion, that can be used for getting started and make the first steps
without connecting to an actual device, but get used to the salt-sproxy
methodology.
The Master configuration file is /home/mircea/master
, which is why the
command is executed using the -c
option specifying the path to the directory
with the configuration file. In this Master configuration file, the
pillar_roots
option points to /srv/salt/pillar
which is where
salt-sproxy
is going to load the Pillar data from. Accordingly, the Pillar
Top file is under that path, /srv/salt/pillar/top.sls
:
base:
minion1:
- dummy
This Pillar Top file says that the Minion minion1
will have the Pillar data
from the dummy.sls
from the same directory, thus
/srv/salt/pillar/dummy.sls
:
proxy:
proxytype: dummy
In this case, it was sufficient to only set the proxytype
field to
dummy
.
salt-sproxy
can be used in conjunction with any of the available Salt
Proxy modules,
or others that you might have in your own environment. See
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/proxyminion/index.html to
understand how to write a new Proxy module if you require.
For example, let's take a look at how we can manage a network device through the NAPALM Proxy:
In the same Python virtual environment as previously, make sure you have
NAPALM
installed, by executing pip install napalm
(see
https://napalm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/index.html for further
installation requirements, depending on the platform you're running on). The
connection credentials for the juniper-router
are stored in the
/srv/salt/pillar/junos.sls
Pillar, and we can go ahead and start executing
arbitrary Salt commands, e.g., net.arp
to retrieve the ARP table, or net.load_config
to apply a configuration change on the router.
The Pillar Top file in this example was (under the same path as previously, as the Master config was the same):
base:
juniper-router:
- junos
Thanks to Tesuto for providing the virtual machine for the demos!
Usage
First off, make sure you have the Salt Pillar Top file is correctly
defined and the proxy
key is available into the Pillar. For more in-depth
explanation and examples, check this tutorial
from the official SaltStack docs.
Once you have that, you can start using salt-sproxy
even without any Proxy
Minions or Salt Master running. To check, can start by executing:
$ salt-sproxy -L a,b,c --preview-target
- a
- b
- c
The syntax is very similar to the widely used CLI command salt
, however the
way it works is completely different under the hood:
salt-sproxy <target> <function> [<arguments>]
Usage Example:
$ salt-sproxy cr1.thn.lon test.ping
cr1.thn.lon:
True
You can continue reading further details at
https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, for now, check out the following
section to see how to get started with salt-sproxy
straight away.