Start and configure Salt Minion

Bitnami OVAs and cloud images include Salt Minion client for remote management. Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Use Salt to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of your infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.

You can check if your server has the Salt Minion client installed by running the command below:

$ sudo dpkg -l salt-minion

Configuring and enabling the already installed service

The Salt Minion client is disabled by default. In order to use it, you will have to configure the master server IP address and then start the associated Systemd service:

$ echo "master: <your-master-node-IP-address>" | sudo tee -a /etc/salt/minion.d/master.conf
$ sudo systemctl enable salt-minion
$ sudo systemctl start salt-minion

Running remote commands

Once you have started the Minion service, you need to accept the Minion key in your master node for the connection to be effective

$ salt-key
  Accepted Keys:
  Denied Keys:
  Unaccepted Keys:
  ip-172-31-16-120
  Rejected Keys:

$ salt-key -y -a ip-172-31-16-120

After that, you can run remote commands from your controller node. For example, you can check the status of the Bitnami services in all your Minion nodes by running the next command

$ salt '*' cmd.run 'sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh status'
    ip-172-31-16-120:
      apache already running
      mariadb already running
      php-fpm already running

You can get further information on how to use Salt in the official docs.

Installing the client in previous images

If you want to use the Salt utility with a Bitnami image that does not include it by default, please refer to the official installation instructions.