20 Jun 2014

Work on Salt is in final state

I was out for a while, it’s exam time in my university. Next to the studying I worked on my GSoC task but didn’t write blog about it. Now, I have done with my exams so I can make up leeway.

I worked on a Salt state module and IMHO it’s development is reaching its final state. I’m done with config generation from YAML, you can find a howto here.

There are a lot of examples I hope you will try them. I don’t want to repeat myself, under the above link you can find information how to use the new syslog-ng state modul.

At first it was difficult to me to generate perfect syntax configurations. There are a lot of statement types (log, channel, source, options, etc.), some of them have names, some not. In a statement you can use already defined statements (I call them references) like source(s_local) or you can define them inline. The statements have options and the options have parameters. Some options have a type (like file(“input.txt”), its type is file), but in some places you can omit them. For example you can write this:

Now you can see, you can’t represent the file type as a dictionary. It should be a list, because its first item is just a string, there is no key for it. You must use different separator characters in different levels of the configuration tree. You can omit the colons in options, but in their parameters you can’t. These are not very difficult problems but they are annoying until you get used to them. I built a recursive algorithm which tracks the level in the configuration and uses the appropriate separators, opening and enclosing characters. You can find the source code here.

Syslog-ng uses words yes and no in some places, so you have to use them in YAML also. PyYAML will load these variables as booleans if you don’t enclose them in quotation marks [1].

If you have any questions or thoughts please leave a comment!

[1]

Till next time,
Tibor Benke at 00:00