Salt Template

A starting point to express testing tools and best practices for custom salt formula.

Structure

A changelog should be maintained to express clearly high level changes, as well as pinned versions to those releases.

README.rst is a template file for the instanciation of a formula that should replace this readme.

Salt installes the directory according to a namespace declared in the root project directory. ./{{ template }} should be named according to what the state will be called when installed to salt. Be careful to avoid naming collisions with the installed server.

Usage

Provided for your convenience are a series of docker-compose tools to aid in the rapid development. These require docker and docker-compose to be used.

Aliases

source aliases will provide the ability to pass commands to the master or minion by title (e.g. master salt-key -L or minion salt-call state.sls foo).

Cookbook

Start a Test Cluster

> docker-compose up -d
> master salt-key -A  # Accepts minion

Increase Number of Minions

> docker-compose scale ubuntu=2
> master salt-key -A  # Accepts new minions

Test the Formula

> master salt '*' state.sls formula

Init System Testing

E.g. upstart, systemd, etc.

Init systems cannot be readily tested in a docker environment and thus require a fully fledged VM host to test against. I've documented the process of setting this up, because it is not officially documented as of Jan 31, 2017.

• Install virtualbox
• Create a virtualbox base image as root -- Base image must offer sshd with user/pass or user/key
• Register runner -- See below for sample config.

Runner Config Sample

[[runners]]
  name = "$RUNNER_NAME"
  url = "$FQDN/ci"
  token = "$TOKEN"
  executor = "virtualbox"
  [runners.ssh]
    user = "$GUEST_USER"
    password = "$GUEST_PASSWORD"
  [runners.virtualbox]
    base_name = "$VM_TO_CLONE"
    disable_snapshots = false
  [runners.cache]

Overview of How Virtualbox Executor Works

• Runner attempts to find $base_name VM.
• Runner attempts to find $base_name VM's $base_snapshot or default ('Base State').
• Runner attempts to find or clones $base_snapshot into $base_name-$key-concurrent-$id.
  • If it did not previously exist, runner snapshots as 'Started'.
  • If it previously existed, the runner reverts to 'Started'.
• Runner connects to clone via SSH and runs the scripts in your job.

Gotchas

• VM must be stopped before executor uses it.
• Virtualbox image must be run as root to setup daemon.
• When requiring sudo access, you will want to exclude sudo password and set a SUDO_ASKPASS env -- apt install ssh-askpass
• Runner creates a snapshot point when it is run the first time. If you need to change the base, delete the snapshot.
• VM snapshot must be removed to update from your base_name.