Installation¶

Quick Install¶

On most distributions, you can set up a Salt Minion with the Salt Bootstrap.

Platform-specific Installation Instructions¶

These guides go into detail how to install Salt on a given platform.

Dependencies¶

Salt should run on any Unix-like platform so long as the dependencies are met.

• Python 2.6 >= 2.6 <3.0
• msgpack-python - High-performance message interchange format
• YAML - Python YAML bindings
• Jinja2 - parsing Salt States (configurable in the master settings)
• MarkupSafe - Implements a XML/HTML/XHTML Markup safe string for Python
• apache-libcloud - Python lib for interacting with many of the popular cloud service providers using a unified API
• Requests - HTTP library

Depending on the chosen Salt transport, ZeroMQ or RAET, dependencies vary:

• ZeroMQ:
  • ZeroMQ >= 3.2.0
  • pyzmq >= 2.2.0 - ZeroMQ Python bindings
  • PyCrypto - The Python cryptography toolkit
  • M2Crypto - "Me Too Crypto" - Python OpenSSL wrapper
• RAET:
  • libnacl - Python bindings to libsodium
  • ioflo - The flo programming interface raet and salt-raet is built on
  • RAET - The worlds most awesome UDP protocol

Salt defaults to the ZeroMQ transport, and the choice can be made at install time, for example:

python setup.py install --salt-transport=raet

This way, only the required dependencies are pulled by the setup script if need be.

If installing using pip, the --salt-transport install option can be provided like:

pip install --install-option="--salt-transport=raet" salt

Optional Dependencies¶

• mako - an optional parser for Salt States (configurable in the master settings)
• gcc - dynamic Cython module compiling

Upgrading Salt¶

When upgrading Salt, the master(s) should always be upgraded first. Backward compatibility for minions running newer versions of salt than their masters is not guaranteed.

Whenever possible, backward compatibility between new masters and old minions will be preserved. Generally, the only exception to this policy is in case of a security vulnerability.