Salt plugin to automate the management and configuration of network devices at scale, without running (Proxy) Minions.
Using salt-sproxy
, you can continue to benefit from the scalability,
flexibility and extensibility of Salt, while you don't have to manage thousands
of (Proxy) Minion services. However, you are able to use both salt-sproxy
and your (Proxy) Minions at the same time.
salt-sproxy
can be used as a standalone tool to manage your devices without
having any further requirements, as well as an extension to your existing Salt
environment (if you already have). In other words, if you have a Salt
installation where you manage some network devices and servers, installing
salt-sproxy
on your Master will allow you to run any Salt command as always,
e.g., executing salt \* test.ping
and salt-sproxy \* test.ping
will have
the exact same effect, and result. On top of that, using salt-sproxy
allows
you to manage other devices for which you don't run (Proxy) Minions for.
Of course, if you don't already have Salt, no problem, you can start managing your devices straight away, check out the quick start steps.
In brief, here are some benefits you can get by using salt-sproxy:
- Say goodbye to the burden of managing hundreds of system services for the Proxy Minion processes.
- Reuse your existing extension modules, templates, Pillars, States, etc., you may have already developed in your environment, transparently.
- You can run it locally, on your own computer.
- Python programming made a breeze - might go well with the ISalt package.
- Integrates easily with your existing Salt environment (if you have), by installing the package on your Salt Master.
- Can continue to leverage the event-driven automation and orchestration methodologies.
- Can continue using any of the usual [targeting mechanisms]( (https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/targeting.html).
- REST API, see also the Salt REST API documentation.
- By sending events to a Salt Master, you are able to implement whatever auditing you need (e.g., what command was executed by who and when, etc.).
- Benefit from inheriting all the native Salt features and integrations contributed by thousands of users, and tested in hundreds of different environments, over almost a decade of development.
No, nothing to do with salt-ssh. The core of salt-sproxy is a Runner loaded dynamically on runtime, that spins up a pool of child processes, each running a temporary light version of the Proxy Minion underneath; as soon as the execution is complete for a device, its associated Proxy Minion is shut down, and another one takes its place into the child processes bucket.
A source of confusion may also be the usage of the Roster interface, which, historically has only been used by salt-ssh, although the Roster is not tightly coupled with salt-ssh: it just happened to be the only use case so far. Essentially, the Roster simply provides a list of devices together with their credentials (e.g., similar to the inventory as dubbed in other automation frameworks) - and now has another use case in salt-sproxy.
The package is distributed via PyPI, under the name salt-sproxy
. If you
would like to install it on your computer, you might want to run it under a
virtual environment.
Besides the CLI, the usage remains the same as when you're running a Salt environment with Proxy or regular Minions. See the following documents on how to get started and fully unleash the power of Salt:
- Salt in 10 minutes.
- Salt fundamentals.
- Salt configuration management.
- Network Automation features available in Salt.
- Network Automation at Scale: up and running in 60 minutes.
- Network Automation at Scale (free e-book).
Install this package where you would like to manage your devices from. In case you need a specific Salt version, make sure you install it beforehand, otherwise this package will bring the latest Salt version available instead.
Execute:
pip install salt-sproxy
To install a specific Salt version, execute, e.g.,
pip install salt==2018.3.4
pip install salt-sproxy
See https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html for more installation details.
The complete documentation is available at https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
On Unix distributions you can also check the documentation locally, by
executing man salt-sproxy
.
See this recording for a live quick start:
In the above, minion1
is
a dummy
Proxy Minion, that can be used for getting started and make the first steps
without connecting to an actual device, but get used to the salt-sproxy
methodology.
The Master configuration file is /home/mircea/master
, which is why the
command is executed using the -c
option specifying the path to the directory
with the configuration file. In this Master configuration file, the
pillar_roots
option points to /srv/salt/pillar
which is where
salt-sproxy
is going to load the Pillar data from. Accordingly, the Pillar
Top file is under that path, /srv/salt/pillar/top.sls
:
base:
minion1:
- dummy
This Pillar Top file says that the Minion minion1
will have the Pillar data
from the dummy.sls
from the same directory, thus
/srv/salt/pillar/dummy.sls
:
proxy:
proxytype: dummy
In this case, it was sufficient to only set the proxytype
field to
dummy
.
salt-sproxy
can be used in conjunction with any of the available Salt
Proxy modules,
or others that you might have in your own environment. See
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/proxyminion/index.html
to understand how to write a new Proxy module if you require.
For example, let's take a look at how we can manage a network device through the NAPALM Proxy:
In the same Python virtual environment as previously, make sure you have
NAPALM
installed, by executing pip install napalm
(see
https://napalm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/index.html
for further installation requirements, depending on the platform you're running on). The
connection credentials for the juniper-router
are stored in the
/srv/salt/pillar/junos.sls
Pillar, and we can go ahead and start executing
arbitrary Salt commands, e.g.,
net.arp
to retrieve the ARP table, or
net.load_config
to apply a configuration change on the router.
The Pillar Top file in this example was (under the same path as previously, as the Master config was the same):
base:
juniper-router:
- junos
First off, make sure you have the Salt
Pillar Top file is
correctly defined and the proxy
key is available into the Pillar. For more
in-depth explanation and examples, check
this
tutorial from the official SaltStack docs.
Once you have that, you can start using salt-sproxy
even without any Proxy
Minions or Salt Master running. To check, can start by executing:
$ salt-sproxy -L a,b,c --preview-target
- a
- b
- c
The syntax is very similar to the widely used CLI command salt
, however the
way it works is completely different under the hood:
salt-sproxy <target> <function> [<arguments>]
Usage Example:
$ salt-sproxy cr1.thn.lon test.ping
cr1.thn.lon:
True
You can continue reading further details at
https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/,
for now, check out the following section to see how to get started with
salt-sproxy
straight away.
See also https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/index.html for more usage examples.
It is still possible to use the salt-sproxy functionality in the event-driven context, even without running Proxy or regular Minions. To see how to achieve this, see this section of the documentation: https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/events.html.
Salt has natively available an HTTP API. You can read more at https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/netapi/all/salt.netapi.rest_cherrypy.html#a-rest-api-for-salt if you haven't used it before. The usage is very simple; for salt-sproxy specifically you can follow the notes from https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/salt_sapi.html how to set it up and use. Usage example - apply a small configuration change on a Juniper device, by executing an HTTP request via the Salt API:
$ curl -sS localhost:8080/run -H 'Accept: application/x-yaml' \
-d eauth='pam' \
-d username='mircea' \
-d password='pass' \
-d client='sproxy' \
-d tgt='juniper-router' \
-d fun='net.load_config' \
-d text='set system ntp server 10.10.10.1'
return:
- juniper-router:
already_configured: false
comment: ''
diff: '[edit system]
+ ntp {
+ server 10.10.10.1;
+ }'
loaded_config: ''
result: true
See the documentation for explanation, and this example for a quick start.
When installing salt-sproxy
, besides the core files (i.e., cli.py
,
parsers.py
, scripts.py
, and version.py
), you will find the
following directories and files, which provide additional features and
backwards compatibility with older Salt versions:
|-- cli.py
|-- parsers.py
|-- _roster/
| |-- ansible.py
| |-- file.py
| |-- netbox.py
| `-- pillar.py
|-- _runners/
| `-- proxy.py
|-- scripts.py
`-- version.py
The extension modules under the _roster
and _runner
directories are
documented at https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/roster/index.html
and https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/runners/index.html,
respectively.
A Docker image is available at
https://hub.docker.com/r/mirceaulinic/salt-sproxy,
and you can pull it, e.g., docker pull mirceaulinic/salt-sproxy
. See
https://salt-sproxy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#docker
for further usage instructions and examples.
Get updates on the salt-sproxy
development, and chat with the project
maintainer(s) and community members:
- Follow @mirceaulinic
- Google Groups
- Use the
salt-sproxy
tag on Stack Overflow. - The
#salt-sproxy
IRC channel on freenode.net. - The #saltstack channel under the networktocode Slack.
This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.
Thanks to Daniel Wallace for the inspiration.