Using HashiCorp Vagrant to run a portable, redeployable Salt lab environment on my Chromebook.
The included Vagrantfile spawns a environment with a single Salt Master (named salt
) and four Salt Minions (named minion##
) running different common Linux distributions for learning, testing, and development. It leverages the libvirt
provider to interact with native Linux virtualization, and has a few tweaks to work around limitations imposed by running this all within ChromeOS's LXC-based Linux development environment.
To make it easier to deploy, test, break, tear down, and redeploy the environment:
roles:saltlab
grain to aid in targeting.gitfs
to pull the starter Salt content from this very Github repo.salt_content/local
get rsync
ed to /srv/
when the master starts up to make it easier to write/test Salt content locally. This is a one-way rsync
from host to VM (and not the other way around), so make sure to write your Salt content on the host and use vagrant rsync
to push changes into the VM.See the blog post for full details on how I've configured my environment.
Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/jbowdre/vagrant-saltlab.git
cd vagrant-saltlab
Review the Vagrantfile, and adjust CPU_COUNT
and MEMORY_MB
if needed. Note that some of the machines won't function correctly with less than 1024
MB.
vim Vagrantfile
Provision the virtual environment:
vagrant up
The master and four minions will be deployed; this will take several minutes. Once complete, you can verify status with vagrant status
:
vagrant status
Current machine states:
salt running (libvirt) # master, ubuntu 22.04
minion01 running (libvirt) # ubuntu 22.04
minion02 running (libvirt) # ubuntu 20.04
minion03 running (libvirt) # rocky 8
minion04 running (libvirt) # rocky 9
This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state. For more information about a specific
VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.
Access an SSH shell on the master with vagrant ssh salt
:
vagrant ssh salt
Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.15.0-83-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/pro
System information as of Tue Feb 6 04:28:02 PM UTC 2024
System load: 0.072265625 Processes: 104
Usage of /: 14.3% of 30.34GB Users logged in: 0
Memory usage: 59% IPv4 address for eth0: 192.168.121.69
Swap usage: 0% IPv4 address for eth1: 192.168.100.120
This system is built by the Bento project by Chef Software
More information can be found at https://github.com/chef/bento
Last login: Tue Feb 6 14:37:44 2024 from 192.168.121.1
vagrant@salt:~$
Verify that all the minion keys have been automatically accepted by the master (this is a lab environment, after all):
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt-key -L
Accepted Keys:
minion01
minion02
minion03
minion04
salt
Denied Keys:
Unaccepted Keys:
Rejected Keys:
Make sure all the minions are responding correctly:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt '*' test.ping
salt:
True
minion03:
True
minion02:
True
minion01:
True
minion04:
True
And confirm that the local and remote content has been successfully merged into the salt://
file system:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt-run fileserver.file_list
- _reactor/sync_grains.sls # gitfs
- neofetch/init.sls # local
- neofetch/uninstall.sls # local
- top.sls # gitfs
- users/init.sls # gitfs
- vim/init.sls # gitfs
- vim/uninstall.sls # gitfs
- vim/vimrc # gitfs
- webserver/index.html # gitfs
- webserver/init.sls # gitfs
- webserver/uninstall.sls # gitfs
You can then apply a state like so:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt '*' state.apply neofetch
Happy Salting!
To blow it all away for a fresh start, just run vagrant destroy -f
. You can then re-do vagrant up
.