Vagrant sports out of the box integration with Saltstack, which works very well with minimum effort. However under the hood the default way this integration works is via a 4000-line bash script that bootstraps Saltstack on the VM. This would all be well and good, however, even if you were to pre-install the salt-call and salt-minion binaries onto your Vagrantbox, the salt-integration uses the same bash-script to install the configuration provided in the Vagrantfile.

So it has come to this..    I don’t really want this in my workflow. And I suspect any heavy Saltstack users might want to skip this aswell.

I found a way, that was not completely obvious, to make the Salt-integration work as quick and painless as I wanted in the Masterless mode:

  • Create a vagrantbox (in my case I use Packer with a set of templates), with the salt-binaries pre-installed.
  • Make sure the salt-minion daemon is disabled.
  • Overwrite the default minion config with the contents  “file_client: local” (and of course any other configuration you require)

This way you do not have to use the “minion_config” setting in your Vagrantfile, and the salt provisioner plugin will happily skip the bootstrapping script.

You could always check the Saltstack installation-script for the Packer-template for reference.

You can now use the following setup in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.synced_folder "salt/roots/", "/srv/salt/"

config.vm.provision :salt do |salt|
  salt.run_highstate = true
end

In salt/roots/ place your top.sls which could look something like this:

pre>base:
  '*':
    - default
</pre>

Which would then execute the salt/roots/default/init.sls state.