Command Line Reference¶

Defining the Target Minions¶

The first argument passed to salt, defines the target minions, the target minions are accessed via their hostname. The default target type is a bash glob:

salt '*foo.com' sys.doc

Salt can also define the target minions with regular expressions:

salt -E '.*' cmd.run 'ls -l | grep foo'

Or to explicitly list hosts, salt can take a list:

salt -L foo.bar.baz,quo.qux cmd.run 'ps aux | grep foo'

More Powerful Targets¶

The simple target specifications, glob, regex, and list will cover many use cases, and for some will cover all use cases, but more powerful options exist.

salt -G 'os:Fedora' test.ping

salt '*' grains.items

salt -C 'G@os:Debian and webser* or E@db.*' test.ping

nodegroups:
  group1: 'L@foo.domain.com,bar.domain.com,baz.domain.com and bl*.domain.com'
  group2: 'G@os:Debian and foo.domain.com'
  group3: 'G@os:Debian and N@group1'

Calling the Function¶

The function to call on the specified target is placed after the target specification.

Functions may also accept arguments, space-delimited:

salt '*' cmd.exec_code python 'import sys; print sys.version'

Optional, keyword arguments are also supported:

salt '*' pip.install salt timeout=5 upgrade=True

They are always in the form of kwarg=argument.

Arguments are formatted as YAML:

salt '*' cmd.run 'echo "Hello: $FIRST_NAME"' env='{FIRST_NAME: "Joe"}'

Note: dictionaries must have curly braces around them (like the env keyword argument above). This was changed in 0.15.1: in the above example, the first argument used to be parsed as the dictionary {'echo "Hello': '$FIRST_NAME"'}. This was generally not the expected behavior.

If you want to test what parameters are actually passed to a module, use the test.arg_repr command:

salt '*' test.arg_repr 'echo "Hello: $FIRST_NAME"' env='{FIRST_NAME: "Joe"}'

salt '*' sys.doc

Compound Command Execution¶

If a series of commands needs to be sent to a single target specification then the commands can be sent in a single publish. This can make gathering groups of information faster, and lowers the stress on the network for repeated commands.

Compound command execution works by sending a list of functions and arguments instead of sending a single function and argument. The functions are executed on the minion in the order they are defined on the command line, and then the data from all of the commands are returned in a dictionary. This means that the set of commands are called in a predictable way, and the returned data can be easily interpreted.

Executing compound commands if done by passing a comma delimited list of functions, followed by a comma delimited list of arguments:

salt '*' cmd.run,test.ping,test.echo 'cat /proc/cpuinfo',,foo

The trick to look out for here, is that if a function is being passed no arguments, then there needs to be a placeholder for the absent arguments. This is why in the above example, there are two commas right next to each other. test.ping takes no arguments, so we need to add another comma, otherwise Salt would attempt to pass "foo" to test.ping.

If you need to pass arguments that include commas, then make sure you add spaces around the commas that separate arguments. For example:

salt '*' cmd.run,test.ping,test.echo 'echo "1,2,3"' , , foo

You may change the arguments separator using the --args-separator option:

salt --args-separator=:: '*' some.fun,test.echo params with , comma :: foo