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The Salt Mine¶

The Salt Mine is used to collect arbitrary data from minions and store it on the master. This data is then made available to all minions via the salt.modules.mine module.

The data is gathered on the minion and sent back to the master where only the most recent data is maintained (if long term data is required use returners or the external job cache).

Mine Functions¶

To enable the Salt Mine the mine_functions option needs to be applied to a minion. This option can be applied via the minion's configuration file, or the minion's Pillar. The mine_functions option dictates what functions are being executed and allows for arguments to be passed in. If no arguments are passed, an empty list must be added:

mine_functions:
  test.ping: []
  network.ip_addrs:
    interface: eth0
    cidr: '10.0.0.0/8'

Mine Functions Aliases¶

Function aliases can be used to provide usage intentions or to allow multiple calls of the same function with different arguments.

New in version 2014.7.0.

mine_functions:
  network.ip_addrs: [eth0]
  networkplus.internal_ip_addrs: []
  internal_ip_addrs:
    mine_function: network.ip_addrs
    cidr: 192.168.0.0/16
  loopback_ip_addrs:
    mine_function: network.ip_addrs
    lo: True

Mine Interval¶

The Salt Mine functions are executed when the minion starts and at a given interval by the scheduler. The default interval is every 60 minutes and can be adjusted for the minion via the mine_interval option:

mine_interval: 60

Example¶

One way to use data from Salt Mine is in a State. The values can be retrieved via Jinja and used in the SLS file. The following example is a partial HAProxy configuration file and pulls IP addresses from all minions with the "web" grain to add them to the pool of load balanced servers.

/srv/pillar/top.sls:

base:
  'G@roles:web':
    - web

/srv/pillar/web.sls:

mine_functions:
  network.ip_addrs: [eth0]

/etc/salt/minion.d/mine.conf:

mine_interval: 5

/srv/salt/haproxy.sls:

haproxy_config:
  file.managed:
    - name: /etc/haproxy/config
    - source: salt://haproxy_config
    - template: jinja

/srv/salt/haproxy_config:

<...file contents snipped...>

{% for server, addrs in salt['mine.get']('roles:web', 'network.ip_addrs', expr_form='pillar').items() %}
server {{ server }} {{ addrs[0] }}:80 check
{% endfor %}

<...file contents snipped...>