Salt 2016.11.0 Release Notes - Codename Carbon#

New Features#

Docker Introspection and Configuration#

Major additions have been made to the Docker support in 2016.11.0. The new addition allows Salt to be executed within a Docker container without a minion running or installed in the container. This allows states to be run inside a container, but also all of Salt's remote execution commands to be run inside docker containers as well. This makes container introspection simple and powerful. See the tutorial on using this new feature here:

See Salt in Docker Containers.

Advanced Ceph Control#

Our friends over at SUSE have delivered a powerful new tool to make the deployment of Ceph storage systems using Salt very easy. These new Ceph tools allow for a storage system to be easily defined using the new ceph.quorum state.

Thorium Additions and Improvements#

The Thorium advanced reactor has undergone extensive testing and updates. These updates include many more Thorium states, a system for automating key management, the ability to use Thorium to easily replace old reactors and a great deal of stability and bug fixes.

State Rollback Using Snapper#

Rollback has been one of the most prevalent requests for Salt. We have researched it extensively and concluded that the only way to accomplish truly reliable rollback would be to execute it at the filesystem layer. To accomplish this we have introduced Snapper integration into Salt States.

Snapper is a tool which allows for simple and reliable snapshots of the filesystem to be made. With the new snapper_states option set to True in the minion config a snapshot will be made before and after every Salt State run.

These snapshots can be viewed, managed and rolled back to via the snapper execution module.

Preserve File Perms in File States#

This feature has been requested for years, the ability to set a flag and use the same file permissions for files deployed to a minion as the permissions set to the file on the master. Just set the keep_mode option on any file management state to True.

Ponies!#

We all agreed that cowsay was just not good enough, install the ponysay command and the new pony outputter will work. Fun for the whole family!

Additional Features#

  • Minions can run in stand-alone mode to use beacons and engines without having to connect to a master. (Thanks @adelcast!)

  • Added a salt runner to allow running salt modules via salt-run.

    salt-run salt.cmd test.ping
# call functions with arguments and keyword arguments
salt-run salt.cmd test.arg 1 2 3 a=1

  • Added SSL support to Cassandra CQL returner. SSL can be enabled by setting ssl_options for the returner. Also added support for specifying protocol_version when establishing cluster connection.

  • The mode parameter in the file.managed state, and the file_mode parameter in the file.recurse state, can both now be set to keep and the minion will keep the mode of the file from the Salt fileserver. This works only with files coming from sources prefixed with salt://, or files local to the minion (i.e. those which are absolute paths, or are prefixed with file://). For example:

    /etc/myapp/myapp.conf:
  file.managed:
    - source: salt://conf/myapp/myapp.conf
    - mode: keep

/var/www/myapp:
  file.recurse:
    - source: salt://path/to/myapp
    - dir_mode: 755
    - file_mode: keep

  • The junos state module is now available. It has all the functions that are present in the junos execution module.

  • The junos state module is now available. It has all the functions that are present in the junos execution module.

  • The minion data cache is a pluggable data store now. It's configurable with cache option. Default is localfs.

  • User names in client_acl support glob matching now.

New Top File Merging Strategy for States#

A new strategy called merge_all has been added to provide a new way of merging top file matches when executing a highstate. See the top_file_merging_strategy documentation for further information.

In addition, the same merging strategy was not functioning as documented. This has now been corrected. While this is technically a bugfix, we decided to hold a change in top file merging until a feature release to minimize user impact.

Improved Archive Extraction Support#

The archive.extracted state has been overhauled. Notable changes include the following:

  • When enforcing ownership (with the user and/or group arguments), the if_missing argument no longer has any connection to which path(s) have ownership enforced. Instead, the paths are determined using the either the newly-added archive.list function, or the newly-added enforce_ownership_on argument.

  • if_missing also is no longer required to skip extraction, as Salt is now able to tell which paths would be present if the archive were extracted. It should, in most cases, only be necessary in cases where a semaphore file is used to conditionally skip extraction of the archive.

  • Password-protected ZIP archives are now detected before extraction, and the state fails without attempting to extract the archive if no password was specified.

  • By default, a single top-level directory is enforced, to guard against 'tar-bombs'. This enforcement can be disabled by setting enforce_toplevel to False.

  • The tar_options and zip_options arguments have been deprecated in favor of a single options argument.

  • The archive_format argument is now optional. The ending of the source argument is used to guess whether it is a tar, zip or rar file. If the archive_format cannot be guessed, then it will need to be specified, but in many cases it can now be omitted.

  • Ownership enforcement is now performed irrespective of whether or not the archive needed to be extracted. This means that the state can be re-run after the archive has been fully extracted to repair changes to ownership.

A number of new arguments were also added. See the docs py:func:docs for the archive.extracted state <salt.states.archive.extracted> for more information.

Additionally, the following changes have been made to the archive execution module:

  • A new function (archive.list) has been added. This function lists the files/directories in an archive file, and supports a verbose argument that gives a more detailed breakdown of which paths are files, which are directories, and which paths are at the top level of the archive.

  • A new function (archive.is_encrypted) has been added. This function will return True if the archive is a password-protected ZIP file, False if not. If the archive is not a ZIP file, an error will be raised.

  • archive.cmd_unzip now supports passing a password, bringing it to feature parity with archive.unzip. Note that this is still not considered to be secure, and archive.unzip is recommended for dealing with password-protected ZIP archives.

  • The default value for the extract_perms argument to archive.unzip has been changed to True.

Improved Checksum Handling in file.managed, archive.extracted States#

When the source_hash argument for these states refers to a file containing checksums, Salt now looks for checksums matching the name of the source URI, as well as the file being managed. Prior releases only looked for checksums matching the filename being managed. Additionally, a new argument (source_hash_name) has been added, which allows the user to disambiguate ambiguous matches when more than one matching checksum is found in the source_hash file.

A more detailed explanation of this functionality can be found in the file.managed documentation, in the section for the new source_hash_name argument.

Note

This improved functionality is also available in the 2016.3 (Boron) release cycle, starting with the 2016.3.5 release.

Config Changes#

The following default config values were changed:

  • gitfs_ssl_verify: Changed from False to True

  • git_pillar_ssl_verify: Changed from False to True

  • winrepo_ssl_verify: Changed from False to True

Grains Changes#

  • All core grains containing VMWare have been changed to VMware, which is the official capitalization. Additionally, all references to VMWare in the documentation have been changed to VMware issue 30807. Environments using versions of Salt before and after Salt 2016.11.0 should employ case-insensitive grain matching on these grains.

    {% set on_vmware = grains['virtual'].lower() == 'vmware' %}

  • On Windows the cpu_model grain has been changed to provide the actual cpu model name and not the cpu family.

    Old behavior:

    root@master:~# salt 'testwin200' grains.item cpu_model
testwin200:
    ----------
    cpu_model:
        Intel64 Family 6 Model 58 Stepping 9, GenuineIntel

    New behavior:

    root@master:~# salt 'testwin200' grains.item cpu_model
testwin200:
    ----------
    cpu_model:
        Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz

Beacons Changes#

  • The loadavg beacon now outputs averages as integers instead of strings. (Via issue 31124.)

Runner Changes#

  • Runners can now call out to utility modules via __utils__.

  • ref:Utility modules <writing-utility-modules> (placed in salt://_utils/) are now able to be synced to the master, making it easier to use them in custom runners. A saltutil.sync_utils function has been added to the saltutil runner to facilitate the syncing of utility modules to the master.

Pillar Changes#

  • Thanks to the new saltutil.sync_utils runner, it is now easier to get ref:utility modules <writing-utility-modules> synced to the correct location on the Master so that they are available in execution modules called from Pillar SLS files.

Junos Module Changes#

  • The following new functionalities were added to the junos module

    • facts - Displays the facts gathered during the connection.

    • shutdown - Shut down or reboot a device running Junos OS.

    • install_config - Modify the configuration of a Junos device.

    • install_os - Install Junos OS software package.

    • zeroize - Remove all configuration information on the Routing Engines and reset all key values on a device.

    • file_copy - Copy file from proxy to the Junos device.

Network Automation: NAPALM#

Beginning with 2016.11.0, network automation is included by default in the core of Salt. It is based on a the NAPALM library and provides facilities to manage the configuration and retrieve data from network devices running widely used operating systems such: JunOS, IOS-XR, eOS, IOS, NX-OS etc.

The connection is established via the NAPALM proxy.

In the current release, the following modules were included:

Cisco NXOS Proxy Minion#

Beginning with 2016.11.0, there is a proxy minion that can be used to configure nxos cisco devices over ssh.

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator Proxy Minion#

Beginning with 2016.11.0, there is a proxy minion to use the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator as a proxy minion.

  • Proxy Minion

  • Execution Module

  • State Module

Junos Module Changes#

  • The following new functionalities were added to the junos module

    • facts - Displays the facts gathered during the connection.

    • shutdown - Shut down or reboot a device running Junos OS.

    • install_config - Modify the configuration of a Junos device.

    • install_os - Install Junos OS software package.

    • zeroize - Remove all configuration information on the Routing Engines and reset all key values on a device.

    • file_copy - Copy file from proxy to the Junos device.

Returner Changes#

  • Any returner which implements a save_load function is now required to accept a minions keyword argument. All returners which ship with Salt have been modified to do so.

Renderer Changes#

Added the ability to restrict allowed renderers. Two new config parameters, renderer_whitelist and renderer_blacklist are introduced for this purpose.

eAuth Changes#

  • External auth modules' auth method can return an ACL list for the given username instead of True. This list should be in the same format as described in the eAuth documentation. It will be used for the user instead of one set in master config.

    Example of the auth method return that allows a user to execute functions in the test and network modules on the minions that match the web* target and allow access to wheel and runner modules:

    [{"web*": ["test.*", "network.*"]}, "@wheel", "@runner"]

  • External auth is supported by salt-run and salt-key now. Note that master must be started to use them with eAuth.

External Module Packaging#

Modules may now be packaged via entry-points in setuptools. See external module packaging tutorial for more information.

Functionality Changes#

  • The onfail requisite now uses OR logic instead of AND logic. issue 22370

  • The consul external pillar now strips leading and trailing whitespace. issue 31165

  • The win_system.py state is now case sensitive for computer names. Previously computer names set with a state were converted to all caps. If you have a state setting computer names with lower case letters in the name that has been applied, the computer name will be changed again to apply the case sensitive name.

  • The mac_user.list_groups function in the mac_user execution module now lists all groups for the specified user, including groups beginning with an underscore. In previous releases, groups beginning with an underscore were excluded from the list of groups.

  • The junos.call_rpc function in the junos execution module can now be used to call any valid rpc. Earlier it used to call only "get_software_information".

  • A new option for minions called master_tries has been added. This specifies the number of times a minion should attempt to contact a master to attempt a connection. This allows better handling of occasional master downtime in a multi-master topology.

  • The default hash_type is now sha256 instead of md5. You will need to make sure both your master and minion share the same hash_type.

  • Nodegroups consisting of a simple list of minion IDs can now also be declared as a yaml list. The below two examples are equivalent:

    # Traditional way
nodegroups:
  - group1: L@host1,host2,host3

# New way (optional)
nodegroups:
  - group1:
    - host1
    - host2
    - host3

New Azure ARM Cloud Driver#

A new cloud driver has been added for Azure ARM, aka, the Azure Resource Manager. The older Azure driver is still required to work with the older Azure API. This new driver works with the newer ARM API, which is managed via the newer Azure Portal website.

New Modules#

Beacons#

  • salt.beacons.avahi_announce

  • salt.beacons.bonjour_announce

  • salt.beacons.haproxy

  • salt.beacons.status

Clouds#

  • salt.cloud.clouds.azurearm

Engines#

  • salt.engines.hipchat

  • salt.engines.http_logstash

Modules#

Outputters#

  • salt.output.pony

Pillar#

  • salt.pillar.csvpillar

  • salt.pillar.http_json

  • salt.pillar.makostack

Returners#

  • salt.returners.zabbix_return

Runners#

SDB#

States#

Thorium#

Deprecations#

General Deprecations#

  • env to saltenv

    All occurrences of env and some occurrences of __env__ marked for deprecation in Salt 2016.11.0 have been removed. The new way to use the salt environment setting is with a variable called saltenv:

    def fcn(msg="", env="base", refresh=True, saltenv="base", **kwargs): ...

    has been changed to

    def fcn(msg="", refresh=True, saltenv="base", **kwargs): ...

    • If env (or __env__) is supplied as a keyword argument to a function that also accepts arbitrary keyword arguments, then a new warning informs the user that env is no longer used if it is found. This new warning will be removed in Salt 2017.7.0.

      def fcn(msg="", refresh=True, saltenv="base", **kwargs): ...

      # will result in a warning log message
fcn(msg="add more salt", env="prod", refresh=False)

    • If env (or __env__) is supplied as a keyword argument to a function that does not accept arbitrary keyword arguments, then python will issue an error.

      def fcn(msg="", refresh=True, saltenv="base"): ...

      # will result in a python TypeError
fcn(msg="add more salt", env="prod", refresh=False)

    • If env (or __env__) is supplied as a positional argument to a function, then undefined behavior will occur, as the removal of env and __env__ from the function's argument list changes the function's signature.

      def fcn(msg="", refresh=True, saltenv="base"): ...

      # will result in refresh evaluating to True and saltenv likely not being a string at all
fcn("add more salt", "prod", False)

  • Deprecations in minion.py:

    • The salt.minion.parse_args_and_kwargs function has been removed. Please use the salt.minion.load_args_and_kwargs function instead.

Cloud Deprecations#

  • The vsphere cloud driver has been removed. Please use the vmware cloud driver instead.

  • The private_ip option in the linode cloud driver is deprecated and has been removed. Use the assign_private_ip option instead.

  • The create_dns_record and delete_dns_record functions are deprecated and have been removed from the digital_ocean driver. Use the post_dns_record function instead.

Execution Module Deprecations#

  • The blockdev execution module had four functions removed:

    • dump

    • tune

    • resize2fs

    • wipe

    The disk module should be used instead with the same function names.

  • The boto_vpc execution module had two functions removed, boto_vpc.associate_new_dhcp_options_to_vpc and boto_vpc.associate_new_network_acl_to_subnet in favor of more concise function names, boto_vpc.create_dhcp_options and boto_vpc.create_network_acl, respectively.

  • The data execution module had getval and getvals functions removed in favor of one function, get, which combines the functionality of the removed functions.

  • File module deprecations:

    • The contains_regex_multiline function was removed. Use file.search instead.

    • Additional command line options for file.grep should be passed one at a time. Please do not pass more than one in a single argument.

  • The lxc execution module has the following changes:

    • The run_cmd function was removed. Use lxc.run instead.

    • The nic argument was removed from the lxc.init function. Use network_profile instead.

    • The clone argument was removed from the lxc.init function. Use clone_from instead.

    • passwords passed to the lxc.init function will be assumed to be hashed, unless password_encrypted=False.

    • The restart argument for lxc.start was removed. Use lxc.restart instead.

    • The old style of defining lxc containers has been removed. Please use keys under which LXC profiles should be configured such as lxc.container_profile.profile_name.

  • The env and activate keyword arguments have been removed from the install function in the pip execution module. The use of bin_env replaces both of these options.

  • reg execution module

    Functions in the reg execution module had misleading and confusing names for dealing with the Windows registry. They failed to clearly differentiate between hives, keys, and name/value pairs. Keys were treated like value names. There was no way to delete a key.

    New functions were added in 2015.5 to properly work with the registry. They also made it possible to edit key default values as well as delete an entire key tree recursively. With the new functions in place, the following functions have been deprecated:

    • read_key

    • set_key

    • create_key

    • delete_key

    Use the following functions instead:

    • for read_key use read_value

    • for set_key use set_value

    • for create_key use set_value with no vname and no vdata

    • for delete_key use delete_key_recursive. To delete a value, use delete_value.

  • The hash_hostname option was removed from the salt.modules.ssh execution module. The hash_known_hosts option should be used instead.

  • The human_readable option was removed from the uptime function in the status execution module. The function was also updated in 2015.8.9 to return a more complete offering of uptime information, formatted as an easy-to-read dictionary. This updated function replaces the need for the human_readable option.

  • The persist kwarg was removed from the win_useradd execution module. This option is no longer supported for Windows. persist is only supported as part of user management in UNIX/Linux.

  • The zpool_list function in the zpool execution module was removed. Use list instead.

Outputter Module Deprecations#

  • The compact outputter has been removed. Set state_verbose to False instead.

Runner Module Deprecations#

  • The grains.cache runner no longer accepts outputter or minion as keyword arguments. Users will need to specify an outputter using the --out option. tgt is replacing the minion kwarg.

  • The fileserver runner no longer accepts the outputter keyword argument. Users will need to specify an outputter using the --out option.

  • The jobs runner no longer accepts the outputter keyword argument. Users will need to specify an outputter using the --out option.

  • virt runner module:

    • The hyper kwarg was removed from the init, list, and query functions. Use the host option instead.

    • The next_hyper function was removed. Use the next_host function instead.

    • The hyper_info function was removed. Use the host_info function instead.

State Module Deprecations#

  • The env and activate keyword arguments were removed from the installed function in the pip state module. The use of bin_env replaces both of these options.

  • reg state module

    The reg state module was modified to work with the new functions in the execution module. Some logic was left in the reg.present and the reg.absent functions to handle existing state files that used the final key in the name as the value name. That logic has been removed so you now must specify value name (vname) and, if needed, value data (vdata).

    For example, a state file that adds the version value/data pair to the Software\Salt key in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive used to look like this:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Salt\\version:
  reg.present:
    - value: 2016.3.1

    Now it should look like this:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Salt
  reg.present:
    - vname: version
    - vdata: 2016.3.1

    A state file for removing the same value added above would have looked like this:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Salt\\version:
  reg.absent:

    Now it should look like this:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Salt
  reg.absent:
    - vname: version

    This new structure is important as it allows salt to deal with key default values which was not possible before. If vname is not passed, salt will work with the default value for that hivekey.

    Additionally, since you could only delete a value from a the state module, a new function (key_absent) has been added to allow you to delete a registry key and all subkeys and name/value pairs recursively. It uses the new delete_key_recursive function.

    For additional information see the documentation for the reg execution and state modules.

  • lxc state module: The following functions were removed from the lxc state module:

    • created: replaced by the present state.

    • started: replaced by the running state.

    • cloned: replaced by the present state. Use the clone_from argument to set the name of the clone source.

  • The hash_hostname option was removed from the salt.states.ssh_known_hosts state. The hash_known_hosts option should be used instead.

  • The always kwarg used in the built function of the pkgbuild state module was removed. Use force instead.

Utils Module Deprecations#

  • The use of jid_dir and jid_load were removed from the salt.utils.jid. jid_dir functionality for job_cache management was moved to the local_cache returner. jid_load data is now retrieved from the master_job_cache.

  • ip_in_subnet function in salt.utils.network.py has been removed. Use the in_subnet function instead.

  • The iam utils module had two functions removed: salt.utils.iam.get_iam_region and salt.utils.iam.get_iam_metadata in favor of the aws utils functions salt.utils.aws.get_region_from_metadata and salt.utils.aws.creds, respectively.