Salt Formula Manager

Tool to automate the downloading of Salt formulas

Table of Contents

1. Overview - what you just read...
2. Usage - How to use this thing
3. Configuration - Getting this thing ready to roll
4. To Do - What needs getting done
5. License - Licensing information
6. Contact - How to contact me

Overview

The goal of this tool is provide a flexible, yet powerful tool to manage Salt formulas. It aims to support many different configurations in an intuitive manner, such as, but not limited to:

• Downloading formulas from multiple sources
• Keeping formula management to one single configuration file
• Avoiding needing to modify the Salt master config file to add new formula sources

Indeed, SaltStack are working on a tool, Salt Package Manager, that aims to do similar things. However, that tool feels a little "hacky", in my opinion, and doesn't use some of the tools that are already available to us, such as git/GitHub, and it requires the use of hosting packages out of a separate repository. Granted, that approach does have its positives, but I felt that I needed something a little lighter than that solution. To each their own :)

Usage

As it currently stands, you should only need to run a simple salt-formula-manager.py in a directory containing your SFM configuration. There are plans to 1) add a "system-wide" or "default" configuration path, so you do not need to be in a specific directory to run this, and 2) to add a -c /path/to/config.yaml parameter to override the default path to the configuration file.

Configuration

Here's an explanation of the current list of configuration parameters...

formulas_url

Defines the default remote URL to use for Salt formulas. The default here is a common repository (https://github.com/SaltStack-Formulas) that, theoretically, most of your formulas will share.

formulas_dir

This defines where your formulas are going to be stored. This can be the same directory as your locally-written Salt states, or this can be an entirely separate directory altogether (Note: you WILL need to have permission to write to this directory).

purge_formulas

If true, SFM will attempt to remove all of the "unmanaged" Salt formulas that are present in the directory defined by formulas_dir (noted above).

formulas

This is just a simple hash/list of formulas to download/manage. Simply giving an array entry (e.g. - munin - note there is no colon), or an empty hash (e.g. - munin: {}) will let SFM attempt to guess the URL and destination directory.

Formula definitions

Each formula listed (as noted above) has specific options that may be set to change the default.

url

The remote URL to use - theoretically, this should work with SSH URLs if you have permission to clone over SSH, otherwise, HTTPS URLs will work just fine if you have permission to access the repository.

git_branch

This defines a specific Git branch to track for changes, if the formula is not on said branch, SFM will attempt to checkout the desired branch.

name

This option is not very important - if the URL isn't specified for a formula, then SFM will attempt to guess the formula's repository URL based off of the default repository URL and the name/title of the formula. If the name isn't specified, SFM will use the title of the title of the entry appended with "-formula" as its name. Thus, a name of "munin-form" with the default URL "https://github.com/SaltStack-Formulas" when end up with "https://github.com/SaltStack-Formula/munin-form"

Note: I'm debating removing this in a future release, as I don't see the use beyond saving a few characters here and there.

To Do

What still needs done...

• Creating symlinks from formulas directory to states directory (to avoid having to check/modify the Salt master configuration)
• Check/modify the Salt master's configuration to allow loading of the downloaded formulas
• Logging actions, failures, etc into a log file
• Find some way of properly tracking versions in a logical and flexible mannger
• Tracking a specific commit (maybe?)
• Tracking a tag (maybe?)
• Better configuration management (e.g. maybe using a class to handle configuration, where to put the configuration files, etc)
• Maybe not running a git pull on every repo, every time the script is run?
• Managing multiple Salt environments

License

This program is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 (I'm not a license guru, if this needs to be changed to comply with other licenses, I'll gladly change it)

Contact

Email me at: brotherballantine@gmail.com

Or you can find me on:

• Mastodon
• Wire (@brotherballan)
• Google+