Bootstrap installation

The Salt Project provides public repositories for packages on the public Broadcom Artifactory endpoint:

The preferred method for installing Salt is using distribution packages. This method ensures that:

  • All dependencies are met.

  • Salt is installed in a tested and distribution-aligned way.

Note

Salt is often distributed in split packages, but only the salt-master and salt-minion packages are required for Salt to function. If only desiring to run Salt in a masterless setup, then only salt-minion is required.

About the Salt bootstrap installation

The Salt Bootstrap project maintains a Bash shell script that installs Salt on Linux/macOS, and a PowerShell script that installs on Windows platforms. The script can install salt-master, salt-minion, and other system packages while enabling Salt services automatically.

For most installations, the best options are typically stable and a version. stable will install the official packages that are fully tested with Salt’s included version of Python and dependencies (AKA onedir) from relenv, and are functional across a wide range of operating systems.

For example:

bootstrap-salt.sh stable 3006.9

The source code and reference documentation for the bootstrap scripts are in the salt-bootstrap repository:

Learn more

The most up-to-date instructions for how to use salt-bootstrap can be found in the salt-bootstrap README, including:

  • How to download Salt bootstrap for Windows and Linux

  • How to install Salt package builds from the Salt Project official package repositories

  • How to install Salt via alternative means (pip, git, etc.)

  • All arguments available for bootstrap

Warning

Older versions of Salt prior to 3006 are no longer supported by this bootstrap script as they have reached their End-Of-Life. Only onedir-based architecture versions of Salt are supported by this bootstrap script.