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:
Upgrade Salt (Assuming you installed salt with pip)
`salt '*' cmd.run '/usr/local/bin/pip install salt --upgrade'`
Restart Salt Minion (Be extra careful with this command)
`salt '*' cmd.run 'sudo pkill -f salt-minion'`
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.