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.
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.
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.
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.