Access Control System¶

Salt maintains a standard system used to open granular control to non administrative users to execute Salt commands. The access control system has been applied to all systems used to configure access to non administrative control interfaces in Salt.These interfaces include, the peer system, the external auth system and the client acl system.

The access control system mandated a standard configuration syntax used in all of the three aforementioned systems. While this adds functionality to the configuration in 0.10.4, it does not negate the old configuration.

Now specific functions can be opened up to specific minions from specific users in the case of external auth and client ACLs, and for specific minions in the case of the peer system.

The access controls are manifested using matchers in these configurations:

client_acl:
  fred:
    - web\*:
      - pkg.list_pkgs
      - test.*
      - apache.*

In the above example, fred is able to send commands only to minions which match the specified glob target. This can be expanded to include other functions for other minions based on standard targets (all matchers are supported except the compound one).

external_auth:
  pam:
    dave:
      - test.ping
      - mongo\*:
        - network.*
      - log\*:
        - network.*
        - pkg.*
      - 'G@os:RedHat':
        - kmod.*
    steve:
      - .*

The above allows for all minions to be hit by test.ping by dave, and adds a few functions that dave can execute on other minions. It also allows steve unrestricted access to salt commands.