SaltHiera

salthiera is a hiera-like tool which is designed to work with SaltStack Pillars via the ext_pillar option.

Background

Hiera is a great way of defining conventions by which environmental data can be accessed. Unfortunately it is limited to specific lookup dictionary "keys", which you specify one at a time. This is incompatible with salt which expects an external pillar to supply a range of keys/values which it merges into its existing pillar information.

Therefore there was a need to create something which gives the convention advantages of the Hiera system which integrates well with SaltStack.

Initially this project is written in Ruby as a gem, however I intend to port to python to align with SaltStack properly when I get the time.

Setup

Installing salthiera

$ gem install salthiera

Define a salthiera.yaml configuration file

$ chown -R puppet:puppet /etc/puppet/secure/keys
$ chmod -R 0500 /etc/puppet/secure/keys
$ chmod 0400 /etc/puppet/secure/keys/*.pem
$ ls -lha /etc/puppet/secure/keys
-r-------- 1 puppet puppet 1.7K Sep 24 16:24 private_key.pkcs7.pem
-r-------- 1 puppet puppet 1.1K Sep 24 16:24 public_key.pkcs7.pem

Use it to lookup data!

$ salthiera -c /etc/salthiera.yaml key1=value1 key2=value

SaltHiera supports keys, values

Authors

• Geoff Meakin - Author