running salt as normal user tutorial¶

Before continuing make sure you have a working Salt installation by following the installation and the configuration instructions.

Stuck?

There are many ways to get help from the Salt community including our mailing list and our IRC channel #salt.

Running Salt functions as non root user¶

If you don't want to run salt cloud as root or even install it you can configure it to have a virtual root in your working directory.

The salt system uses the salt.syspath module to find the variables

If you run the salt-build, it will generated in:

./build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/salt/_syspaths.py

To generate it, run the command:

python setup.py build

Copy the generated module into your salt directory

cp ./build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/salt/_syspaths.py salt/_syspaths.py

Edit it to include needed variables and your new paths

# you need to edit this
ROOT_DIR = *your current dir* + '/salt/root'

# you need to edit this
INSTALL_DIR = *location of source code*

CONFIG_DIR =  ROOT_DIR + '/etc/salt'
CACHE_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/var/cache/salt'
SOCK_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/var/run/salt'
SRV_ROOT_DIR= ROOT_DIR + '/srv'
BASE_FILE_ROOTS_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/srv/salt'
BASE_PILLAR_ROOTS_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/srv/pillar'
BASE_MASTER_ROOTS_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/srv/salt-master'
LOGS_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/var/log/salt'
PIDFILE_DIR = ROOT_DIR + '/var/run'
CLOUD_DIR = INSTALL_DIR + '/cloud'
BOOTSTRAP = CLOUD_DIR + '/deploy/bootstrap-salt.sh'

Create the directory structure

mkdir -p root/etc/salt root/var/cache/run root/run/salt root/srv
root/srv/salt root/srv/pillar root/srv/salt-master root/var/log/salt root/var/run

Populate the configuration files:

cp -r conf/* root/etc/salt/

Edit your root/etc/salt/master configuration that is used by salt-cloud:

user: *your user name*

Run like this:

PYTHONPATH=`pwd` scripts/salt-cloud