SSH Ext Alternatives¶

In the 2019.2.0 release the ssh_ext_alternatives feature was added. This allows salt-ssh to work across different supported python versions. You will need to ensure you have the following:

Salt is installed, with all required dependencies for the Python version.

Everything needs to be importable from the respective Python environment.

To enable using this feature you will need to edit the master configuration similar to below:

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        dependencies:           # List of dependencies and their installation paths
          jinja2: /opt/jinja2
          yaml: /opt/yaml
          tornado: /opt/tornado
          msgpack: /opt/msgpack
          certifi: /opt/certifi
          singledispatch: /opt/singledispatch.py
          singledispatch_helpers: /opt/singledispatch_helpers.py
          markupsafe: /opt/markupsafe
          backports_abc: /opt/backports_abc.py

Warning

When using Salt versions >= 3001 and Python 2 is your py-version you need to use an older version of Salt that supports Python 2. For example, if using Salt-SSH version 3001 and you do not want to install Python 3 on your target host you can use ssh_ext_alternatives's path option. This option needs to point to a 2019.2.3 Salt installation directory on your Salt-SSH host, which still supports Python 2.

auto_detect¶

In the 3001 release the auto_detect feature was added for ssh_ext_alternatives. This allows salt-ssh to automatically detect the path to all of your dependencies and does not require you to define them under dependencies.

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        auto_detect: True       # Auto detect dependencies
        py_bin: /usr/bin/python2.7 # Python binary path used to auto detect dependencies

If py_bin is not set alongside auto_detect, it will attempt to auto detect the dependencies using the major version set in py-version. For example if you have [2, 7] set as your py-version, it will attempt to use the binary python2.

You can also use auto_detect and dependencies together.

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        auto_detect: True       # Auto detect dependencies
        py_bin: /usr/bin/python2.7 # Python binary path to auto detect dependencies
        dependencies:           # List of dependencies and their installation paths
          jinja2: /opt/jinja2

If a dependency is defined in the dependencies list ssh_ext_alternatives will use this dependency, instead of the path that auto_detect finds. For example, if you define /opt/jinja2 under your dependencies for jinja2, it will not try to autodetect the file path to the jinja2 module, and will favor /opt/jinja2.