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File Server Backends¶

In Salt 0.12.0, the modular fileserver was introduced. This feature added the ability for the Salt Master to integrate different file server backends. File server backends allow the Salt file server to act as a transparent bridge to external resources. A good example of this is the git backend, which allows Salt to serve files sourced from one or more git repositories, but there are several others as well. Click here for a full list of Salt's fileserver backends.

Enabling a Fileserver Backend¶

Fileserver backends can be enabled with the fileserver_backend option.

fileserver_backend:
  - git

See the documentation for each backend to find the correct value to add to fileserver_backend in order to enable them.

Using Multiple Backends¶

If fileserver_backend is not defined in the Master config file, Salt will use the roots backend, but the fileserver_backend option supports multiple backends. When more than one backend is in use, the files from the enabled backends are merged into a single virtual filesystem. When a file is requested, the backends will be searched in order for that file, and the first backend to match will be the one which returns the file.

fileserver_backend:
  - roots
  - git

With this configuration, the environments and files defined in the file_roots parameter will be searched first, and if the file is not found then the git repositories defined in gitfs_remotes will be searched.

Defining Environments¶

Just as the order of the values in fileserver_backend matters, so too does the order in which different sources are defined within a fileserver environment. For example, given the below file_roots configuration, if both /srv/salt/dev/foo.txt and /srv/salt/prod/foo.txt exist on the Master, then salt://foo.txt would point to /srv/salt/dev/foo.txt in the dev environment, but it would point to /srv/salt/prod/foo.txt in the base environment.

file_roots:
  base:
    - /srv/salt/prod
  qa:
    - /srv/salt/qa
    - /srv/salt/prod
  dev:
    - /srv/salt/dev
    - /srv/salt/qa
    - /srv/salt/prod

Similarly, when using the git backend, if both repositories defined below have a hotfix23 branch/tag, and both of them also contain the file bar.txt in the root of the repository at that branch/tag, then salt://bar.txt in the hotfix23 environment would be served from the first repository.

gitfs_remotes:
  - https://mydomain.tld/repos/first.git
  - https://mydomain.tld/repos/second.git

Note

Environments map differently based on the fileserver backend. For instance, the mappings are explicitly defined in roots backend, while in the VCS backends (git, hg, svn) the environments are created from branches/tags/bookmarks/etc. For the minion backend, the files are all in a single environment, which is specified by the minionfs_env option.

See the documentation for each backend for a more detailed explanation of how environments are mapped.