Start the master and minion services

After you’ve installed and configured your Salt masters and minions, you need to start the minions so that they can:

• Send their keys to the master for acceptance.

• Begin listening to the master_minion.pub for commands.

You can then start the Salt master and accept the minion keys. See Accept the minion keys for more information.

Note

Before you start the Salt master and minions, you must first install the salt-master and salt-minion services and configure the Salt minion to connect to the Salt master. See Configure the Salt master and minions for more information.

Starting Salt services

Using systemctl is the main way to start Salt processes. Calling the process directly will show the active logs in the foreground.

Start with systemctl

When starting salt-master and salt-minion, using systemctl is recommended.

systemctl start salt-master
systemctl start salt-minion

systemctl is also useful for preliminary debugging and process start/stop confirmation:

systemctl [start|status|stop] [salt-master|salt-minion]

Starting in the foreground

The salt-master and salt-minion daemons can show their logs in the terminal by calling their processes directly:

salt-master
salt-minion

Next steps

After starting the Salt services, the Salt minion keys need to be accepted by the Salt master. See Accept the minion keys for more information.