Salt Runners¶

Salt runners are convenience applications executed with the salt-run command.

Salt runners work similarly to Salt execution modules however they execute on the Salt master itself instead of remote Salt minions.

A Salt runner can be a simple client call or a complex application.

Writing Salt Runners¶

A Salt runner is written in a similar manner to a Salt execution module. Both are Python modules which contain functions and each public function is a runner which may be executed via the salt-run command.

For example, if a Python module named test.py is created in the runners directory and contains a function called foo, the test runner could be invoked with the following command:

# salt-run test.foo

To add custom runners, put them in a directory and add it to runner_dirs in the master configuration file.

Examples¶

Examples of runners can be found in the Salt distribution:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/runners

A simple runner that returns a well-formatted list of the minions that are responding to Salt calls could look like this:

# Import salt modules
import salt.client

def up():
    '''
    Print a list of all of the minions that are up
    '''
    client = salt.client.LocalClient(__opts__['conf_file'])
    minions = client.cmd('*', 'test.ping', timeout=1)
    for minion in sorted(minions):
        print minion