Upgrading and Restarting Salt on OS X

| apple | devops |

I have been working a lot with salt this month on OS X. I have done some work in the past with Linux and it is a much more pleasant experience. Recently I have salted the installation of DataDog on a fleet of Mac Minis. My initial attempts did not work for several reasons. First, I was getting an error message from salt complaining that list indicies must be integers, not str. This turned out to be a python bug that was resolved in the latest version of salt. After upgrading salt-master and salt-minion to the latest versions I was getting yet another error stating that global name ‘salt_system_encoding’ is not defined. It turns out that this error can be resolved by restarting salt-minion. This turned out to be an issue on OS X because if you attempt to simply restart the process with salt-minion restart it hangs up and does nothing. If you try to run kill, or killall it is not able to match the name salt-minion for some reason. At first I was logging into each box manually and kill 9ing, but this kind of defeated the entire purpose of salt so I was determined to find a better way. This is where pkill comes in to save the day. pkill is able to match on salt-minion and is a working solution to restart salt-minion. On OS X salt-minion appears to run as a super daemon and immediately restarts if you try to kill it. This is not so bad since all we need to do to resolve the errors above is kill all of the old salt-minion processes. The complete process to upgrade and restart salt-minion on OS X is outlined below:

  1. Upgrade Salt (Assuming you installed salt with pip)
    `salt '*' cmd.run '/usr/local/bin/pip install salt --upgrade'`
    
  2. Restart Salt Minion (Be extra careful with this command)
    `salt '*' cmd.run 'sudo pkill -f salt-minion'`
    
  3. Verify that you are on the latest version (salt-minion 2015.5.5 (Lithium) as of this post)
    `salt '*' cmd.run '/usr/local/bin/salt-minion --version'`
    
After following these steps, everything is now working! So, now I have the latest version of salt-minion, DataDog chugging along, and I was able to do it all without resorting to writing some jenky bash script or logging in manually to each box. Salt on OS X has been a headache so far, but hopefully with everything being on the latest version things will be a bit smoother going forward.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Who Is The Sky? by David Byrne

Seeing David Byrne last night for the first-ever performance of Who Is The Sky was one of the best and most impactful concerts/experiences of my life.

via Blog – Brad Frost September 17, 2025

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism's causal chain (17 Sep 2025)

Today's links Conspiratorialism's causal chain: A four-part begat. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Legal threats over HDCP leaks; Print your own TSA luggage keys; "A Natural History of Empty Lots." Upcoming appe…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow September 17, 2025

Theatre Review: Interview (Understudy Performance) ★★★☆☆

One of the best things about London theatre is that once in a while a show will give its understudies a chance to break out of the dressing room and soar on the stage. It's a chance to see talented performers at a discount price. What's not to lik…

via Terence Eden’s Blog September 17, 2025

Generated by openring