Windows

Salt has full support for running the Salt Minion on Windows.

You must connect Windows Salt minions to a Salt master on a supported operating system to control your Salt Minions.

Many of the standard Salt modules have been ported to work on Windows and many of the Salt States currently work on Windows as well.

Installation from the Official SaltStack Repository

Latest stable build from the selected branch:

x86: Salt-Minion-2016.3.6-x86-Setup.exe | md5

AMD64: Salt-Minion-2016.3.6-AMD64-Setup.exe | md5

The output of md5sum <salt minion exe> should match the contents of the corresponding md5 file.

Earlier builds from supported branches

Archived builds from unsupported branches

Note

The installation executable installs dependencies that the Salt minion requires.

The 64bit installer has been tested on Windows 7 64bit and Windows Server 2008R2 64bit. The 32bit installer has been tested on Windows 2008 Server 32bit. Please file a bug report on our GitHub repo if issues for other platforms are found.

The installer asks for 2 bits of information; the master hostname and the minion name. The installer will update the minion config with these options and then start the minion.

The salt-minion service will appear in the Windows Service Manager and can be started and stopped there or with the command line program sc like any other Windows service.

sc start salt-minion
net start salt-minion

If the minion won't start, try installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 x64 SP1 redistributable. Allow all Windows updates to run salt-minion smoothly.

Installation Prerequisites

Most Salt functionality should work just fine right out of the box. A few Salt modules rely on PowerShell. The minimum version of PowerShell required for Salt is version 3. If you intend to work with DSC then Powershell version 5 is the minimum.

Silent Installer Options

The installer can be run silently by providing the /S option at the command line. The installer also accepts the following options for configuring the Salt Minion silently:

Option Description
/minion-name= A string value to set the minion name. Default is 'hostname'
/master= A string value to set the IP address or host name of the master. Default value is salt.
/start-service= Either a 1 or 0. '1' will start the service, '0' will not. Default is to start the service after installation.

Here's an example of using the silent installer:

Salt-Minion-2016.3.3-Setup-amd64.exe /S /master=yoursaltmaster /minion-name=yourminionname /start-service=0

Running the Salt Minion on Windows as an Unprivileged User

Notes:

  • These instructions were tested with Windows Server 2008 R2
  • They are generalizable to any version of Windows that supports a salt-minion

Create the Unprivileged User that the Salt Minion will Run As

  1. Click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts.
  2. Click Add or remove user accounts.
  3. Click Create new account.
  4. Enter salt-user (or a name of your preference) in the New account name field.
  5. Select the Standard user radio button.
  6. Click the Create Account button.
  7. Click on the newly created user account.
  8. Click the Create a password link.
  9. In the New password and Confirm new password fields, provide a password (e.g "SuperSecretMinionPassword4Me!").
  10. In the Type a password hint field, provide appropriate text (e.g. "My Salt Password").
  11. Click the Create password button.
  12. Close the Change an Account window.

Add the New User to the Access Control List for the Salt Folder

  1. In a File Explorer window, browse to the path where Salt is installed (the default path is C:\Salt).
  2. Right-click on the Salt folder and select Properties.
  3. Click on the Security tab.
  4. Click the Edit button.
  5. Click the Add button.
  6. Type the name of your designated Salt user and click the OK button.
  7. Check the box to Allow the Modify permission.
  8. Click the OK button.
  9. Click the OK button to close the Salt Properties window.

Update the Windows Service User for the salt-minion Service

  1. Click Start > Administrative Tools > Services.
  2. In the Services list, right-click on salt-minion and select Properties.
  3. Click the Log On tab.
  4. Click the This account radio button.
  5. Provide the account credentials created in section A.
  6. Click the OK button.
  7. Click the OK button to the prompt confirming that the user has been granted the Log On As A Service right.
  8. Click the OK button to the prompt confirming that The new logon name will not take effect until you stop and restart the service.
  9. Right-Click on salt-minion and select Stop.
  10. Right-Click on salt-minion and select Start.

Building and Developing on Windows

This document will explain how to set up a development environment for Salt on Windows. The development environment allows you to work with the source code to customize or fix bugs. It will also allow you to build your own installation.

There are several scripts to automate creating a Windows installer as well as setting up an environment that facilitates developing and troubleshooting Salt code. They are located in the pkg\windows directory in the Salt repo (here).

Scripts:

Script Description
build_env.ps1 A PowerShell script that sets up the build environment
build_pkg.bat A batch file that builds a Windows installer based on the contents of the C:\Python27 directory
build.bat A batch file that fully automates the building of the Windows installer using the above two scripts

Note

The build.bat and build_pkg.bat scripts both accept a single parameter to specify the version of Salt that will be displayed in the Windows installer. If no version is passed, the version will be determined using git.

Prerequisite Software

The only prerequisite is Git for Windows.

Create a Build Environment

1. Working Directory

Create a Salt-Dev directory on the root of C:. This will be our working directory. Navigate to Salt-Dev and clone the Salt repo from GitHub.

Open a command line and type:

cd \
md Salt-Dev
cd Salt-Dev
git clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Go into the salt directory and checkout the version of salt to work with (2016.3 or higher).

cd salt
git checkout 2016.3

2. Setup the Python Environment

Navigate to the pkg\windows directory and execute the build_env.ps1 PowerShell script.

cd pkg\windows
powershell -file build_env.ps1

Note

You can also do this from Explorer by navigating to the pkg\windows directory, right clicking the build_env.ps1 powershell script and selecting Run with PowerShell

This will download and install Python with all the dependencies needed to develop and build Salt.

Note

If you get an error or the script fails to run you may need to change the execution policy. Open a powershell window and type the following command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

3. Salt in Editable Mode

Editable mode allows you to more easily modify and test the source code. For more information see the Pip documentation.

Navigate to the root of the salt directory and install Salt in editable mode with pip

cd \Salt-Dev\salt
pip install -e .

Note

The . is important

Note

If pip is not recognized, you may need to restart your shell to get the updated path

4. Setup Salt Configuration

Salt requires a minion configuration file and a few other directories. The default config file is named minion located in C:\salt\conf. The easiest way to set this up is to copy the contents of the salt\pkg\windows\buildenv directory to C:\salt.

cd \
md salt
xcopy /s /e \Salt-Dev\salt\pkg\windows\buildenv\* \salt\

Now go into the C:\salt\conf directory and edit the file name minion (no extension). You need to configure the master and id parameters in this file. Edit the following lines:

master: <ip or name of your master>
id: <name of your minion>

Create a Windows Installer

To create a Windows installer, follow steps 1 and 2 from Create a Build Environment above. Then proceed to 3 below:

3. Install Salt

To create the installer for Window we install Salt using Python instead of pip. Navigate to the root salt directory and install Salt.

cd \Salt-Dev\salt
python setup.py install

4. Create the Windows Installer

Navigate to the pkg\windows directory and run the build_pkg.bat with the build version (2016.3) script.

cd pkg\windows
build_pkg.bat 2016.3

Note

If no version is passed, the build_pkg.bat will guess the version number using git.

Creating a Windows Installer: Alternate Method (Easier)

Clone the Salt repo from GitHub into the directory of your choice. We're going to use Salt-Dev.

cd \
md Salt-Dev
cd Salt-Dev
git clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Go into the salt directory and checkout the version of Salt you want to build.

cd salt
git checkout 2016.3

Then navigate to pkg\windows and run the build.bat script with the version you're building.

cd pkg\windows
build.bat 2016.3

This will install everything needed to build a Windows installer for Salt. The binary will be in the salt\pkg\windows\installer directory.

Testing the Salt minion

  1. Create the directory C:\salt (if it doesn't exist already)

  2. Copy the example conf and var directories from

    pkg\windows\buildenv into C:\salt

  3. Edit C:\salt\conf\minion

    master: ipaddress or hostname of your salt-master

  4. Start the salt-minion

    cd C:\Python27\Scripts
python salt-minion -l debug

  5. On the salt-master accept the new minion's key

    sudo salt-key -A

    This accepts all unaccepted keys. If you're concerned about security just accept the key for this specific minion.

  6. Test that your minion is responding

    On the salt-master run:

    sudo salt '*' test.ping

You should get the following response: {'your minion hostname': True}

Packages Management Under Windows 2003

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP have both reached End of Support. Though Salt is not officially supported on operating systems that are EoL, some functionality may continue to work.

On Windows Server 2003, you need to install optional component "WMI Windows Installer Provider" to get a full list of installed packages. If you don't have this, salt-minion can't report some installed software.

Generated on July 18, 2017 at 06:45:48 MDT.

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