Is there a way to enable minion on master?

[abhi1693]

I need to be able to fetch basic information about the master via the API such as version it's running. This is needed by 3rd party integrations to ensure we can begin the minion upgrade process when this version changes. One idea was to simply install a minion inside the master. I tried adding a minion.conf in the config directory with just master: localhost and it started throwing errors about missing directories.

I was wondering if this is a hidden feature of this repo so that I can simply enable this via environment variable and start managing our master too?

[abhi1693]

I managed to install salt-minion with the same version as master inside the container. But I had to update the /etc/salt/minion and /etc/salt/minion_id manually to make it work. It may be useful for others to get this functionality as well as part of the container runtime.

The container can create minimalistic configuration so that it works out-of-the-box by providing a way to overide the minion_id. I guess it can default to local when not set exlpicitly. The custom configuration can be modelled just like how master config is managed.

[cdalvaro]

Hi @abhi1693, I'm curious about this.

How can you use a salt-minion to get the salt-master version? And, what other things do you want to do with a minion inside the container?

It's just curiosity. I think I can add the this support if it adds value to the image. But I would like to know more details to do it right.

[abhi1693]

Via salt-api, I can send test.version targetting the minion running on the master. If this package is installed with the exact versoin of master, it's safe to assume the the version returned is of the master. Another way is to call the API with salt-call --local test.version using cmd.run.
Another thing, we want to do is grab the log files when we need to troubleshoot issues remotely rather than logging into the machine. Currently, these are the only 2 use cases I have but we may have more in future.

[cdalvaro]

There are some modules for external logging.

Also you can use rsyslog to receive master's logs.

Having a salt-minion instance running inside the container will increase resources consumption and will add more complexity to the image (more things to fail)

I just want to have a good reason to add this support.

[cdalvaro]

Hi @abhi1693,

I have just released image 3007.0_2 with support for internal salt-minion.

Could you tell me the new release works fine for you?