# Salt Notes.md
Salt is the configuration management tool

---
My first section
02/02/2020

Deploying Salt event monitoring for Splunk
1. push new git files
2. sync_all
3. refresh_pillar
4. salt state for updating minions config
    

---
Custom grains
10/20/2019

`_grains/mdr_environment.py`
This file discovers which aws account the ec2 instnace is in. 
grain is called `dr_environment`
but it is broken on salt master, the minion has a static file `/etc/salt/grains`
`saltutil.sync_grains`

ERROR: Could not get AWS connection: global name 'boto3' is not defined
SOLUTION: see Salt Upgrade Notes.md


--------
Highstate
11/20/2019

Cron job for state.apply ( DISABLED DURING REFACTOR )
salt manages a cron job on the master 


--------
salt-minion reactor

when a salt-minion restarts the reactor kicks off a state.apply. This causes a notification when the salt-minion starts up and you try to apply a state. 



--------
gitfs lock file

/var/cache/salt/master/gitfs/gitfs-base-msoc/.git/update.lk


--------
Test salt master

Switch branch on test salt-master for testing
salt-run fileserver.update
salt-run fileserver.file_list | grep mystuff


## Testing git branches using environments:
You can use a different git branch for testing by specifying an environment to salt:
```
sudo salt-run fileserver.update # Refresh from git
salt target saltutil.sync_all saltenv=mybranchname 
salt target state.sls mytestsls saltenv=mybranchname 
```

## Bringing on a new minion

You probably want the grains synchronized before the minion is pushed to highstate.
After accepting the key, run:
```
salt '*' saltutil.sync_grains
salt '*' saltutil.sync_all
```

We can do this via a reactor. See https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/reactor/index.html#minion-start-reactor