Getting Started

This requires at least the 2016.11.0 release of saltstack.

http://repo.saltstack.com/

Then just yum install -y salt-minion

Modules from Nitrogen

You will also need a few new modules and a new engine that will be in the Nitrogen release.

In /srv/salt/_modules you will need the following two modules: new hashutil module and new event module

And the thing that makes it all possible the new webhook engine needs to be put in /srv/salt/_engines : Webhook engine

Once these are all in place, run salt-call saltutil.sync_all to make sure they get put in the extmods directory and are usable.

Configuration

My configurations are located here but I will highlight some of the specifics here.

First, we want to make the minion a masterless minion, and to never query the master for anything. So to /etc/salt/minion.d/local.conf add

local : True file_client : local master_type : disable

Any one of the settings could be used, I like to use all three just to make certain.

Second, we need to setup the ssl keys so that we can have a secure connection. To do this, you can run the following command to create a generic ssl certificate, if you want to have verification in there, you can make a nice one for the domain and everything, but we just want to have the traffice encrypted, so use salt-call --local tls.create_self_signed_cert . Now that we have an ssl certificate pair, we can setup the webhook engine. I put the following in /etc/salt/minion.d/engines.conf .

engines: - webhook: address: None port: 5000 ssl_crt: /etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.crt ssl_key: /etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.key - reactor: {} reactor: - 'salt/engines/hook/update/blog/gtmanfred.com': - salt://reactor/blog.gtmanfred.com.sls

This will enable the webhook on all ips on port 5000 with the listed ssl certificate. It will also enable the reactor to be able to act upon the one tag in the event stream, which we will get to later.

Now we need to setup the github webhook so we can see the events in the event stream. Go to your blog's github repository, and go to the settings. Then select webhooks, and create a new one.

For the "Payload URL" you are going to set https and then the ip address/domain and port to access, followed by the uri which should match what your are going to trigger on for the reactor. As you can see in the picture above, I have /update/blog/gtmanfred.com as my URI, and this matches what follows the prefix salt/engines/hook in the reactor config above. Be sure to add a secret! And don't forget it! We will be verifying that in a later step. Then customize which events you would like to trigger on and save. I am going to rebuild the blog on each push, so I am only sending push events.

BE SURE TO DISABLE SSL VERIFICATION IF YOU DON'T USE A SIGNED KEY!

Before you forget that secret key, we should save it somewhere. I use sdb in salt so that I can save my states and reactors in public github, but hide the secret key in sdb. Create /etc/salt/minion.d/sdb.conf with the following.

secrets : driver : sqlite3 database : /var/lib/s db . sqlite table : sdb create_table : True

Now run salt-call --local sdb.set sdb://secrets/github_secret <secretkey> to save the key.

Now the last step, creating the reactor file in the salt fileserver. Mine is in /srv/salt/reactor/blog.gtmanfred.com.sls, so I just have to reference it with salt://reactor/blog.gtmanfred.com.sls (and can also use the reactor files from gitfs).

{%- if salt.hashutil.github_signature(data['body'], salt.sdb.get('sdb://secrets/github_secret'), data['headers']['X-Hub-Signature']) %} highstate_run: caller.state.apply: - args: [] {%- endif %}