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Debugging Salt and Salt States

July 15, 2014 | 2 minutes read

Tags: devops, saltstack

Some tips and tricks to debug salt (states).

  • Trigger the deployment with direct and verbose feedback on terminal
  • Enables identification of slow state functions, i.e. repository refreshs

Log into client machine, as root / sudo:

salt-call -l debug state.highstate

To apply a single state file (not recommended on production):

salt-call -l debug state.sls elasticsearch

Also useful to apply special housekeeping states (not in highstate), here a state that purges unnecessary kernels which is found in env stable:

salt-call state.sls kernelpurge stable

When fixing sth. on a machine an adapting the configuration management, one often want’s to double check that it is applied correctly before applying a state or a highstate again. This can be easily accomplished by running with test set to True:

salt-call state.sls elasticsearch test=True

or

salt-call state.highstate test=True

A diff of what would have been change is shown at the end but not applied, which can be checked for differences, i.e. in config files.

  • Get quick feedback on salt state editing

  • Create Vagrantfile according to vagrant salt provisioner documentation.

  • Setup master and minion as close to your production setup

  • Map salt sources into vm (/vagrant)

    vagrant up salt-master vagrant up salt-minion

  • Use salt-call in conjunction with state.highstate or state.sls as described above.

Start master / minion in debug mode

  • Connection problems
  • Salt State / Pillar rendering
service salt-minion stop

or

/etc/init.d/salt-minion stop

then

salt-minion -l debug

service salt-master stop

or

/etc/init.d/salt-master stop

then

salt-master -l debug

In both cases, the log information is written to the terminal.

pdb $(which salt-master)

/usr/local:
  file.directory:
    - recurse
    - mode: 755
  • Solution: recurse is not formulated as dict.
nginx:
  pkg.installed

nginx:
  service.running

nginx:
  pkg.installed: []
    service.running: []

nginx_package:
  pkg.installed:
    - name: nginx

nginx_service:
  service.running:
    - name: nginx