4

Background: I have been working on setting up a salt-environment, and reached the point where I want to distribute not only files, but also directories. I've found that the most sensible way to do this is to place the directory I want copied in /srv/salt/path_to_dir on the master, and then use the cp.get_dir command to distribute it.

What I have done: To test the setup and command I created /srv/salt/tmp/foo and placed two files in it. Then when I run the command salt minion_name cp.get_dir salt://tmp/foo /tmp/foo on the master there is one line of output that reads exactly minion_name:. Somewhat strange that there is no output except the minion name, even error, but ok, I go to check the minion to see if anything has happened.

On the minion it has not appeared in /tmp/, and there is no new content in /etc/salt/ or /var/cache/salt/ either. I checked in /var/log/salt/minion, but there is nothing except my hour old attempts at figuring out why I couldn't use file.copy with recursion set to true for distributing files.

My question(s): Is there anything obvious that I have done wrong? According to the documentation I found what I have done should work. There doesn't seem to be any error output either. Should I try using a different command or approach to distribute folders with content from the master through salt instead?

Additional information: Both the master and all the minions are Debian-systems. The installed versions of salt are salt 2014.1.3 (Hydrogen) on the master and salt-minion 0.17.5 and salt-minion 2015.5.3 on the minions I have tried this approach with.

1 Answer 1

5

I'm not sure how you can do this using modules, I tried the same ones you did and had the same results, so possibly a bug, but if you want to set up an sls state you can use the file.recurse functionality, it looks like this:

as reference I'm using:

  • /srv/salt/test1/init.sls as my sls file,
  • inside test1 is the src directory testdir
  • our target on the machine we want to copy to is /test

init.sls

/test:
 file.recurse:
  - source: salt://test1/testdir
  - include_empty: True

from that point you can

salt '<targetmachine>' state.sls test1
2
  • Thanks, it's nice to hear that it's not just something I messed up, and also your solution works nicely =) There is a slight typo though, I guess it was supposed to be '<targetmachine>' and not '<targetmachine>/, but I could not suggest an edit of only one char, so I'm just putting it down here.
    – simonra
    Sep 16, 2015 at 12:21
  • haha, Yeah, Definitely a typo, Fixed. Glad that it worked out for you. Hopefully whatever is wrong with the cp module will get fixed in the near future.
    – Gravy
    Sep 16, 2015 at 19:23

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.