Before Salt can be used for provisioning on the desired machine, the binaries need to be installed. Since Salt supports many different distributions and versions of operating systems, the Salt installation process is handled by this shell script bootstrap-salt-minion.sh. This script runs through a series of checks to determine operating system type and version to then install the Salt binaries using the appropriate methods.

If you're looking for the one-liner to install salt...

For example, using curl to install latest git:

curl -L http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh -s git develop

Or, using wget to install your distribution's stable packages:

wget -O - http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh

If you have certificate issues using wget try the following:

wget --no-check-certificate -O - http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh

If you already have python installed, then it's as easy as:

python -m urllib "http://bootstrap.saltstack.org" | sudo sh -s git develop

In order to install salt for a distribution you need to define:

1. To Install Dependencies, which is required, one of:

install_<distro>_<distro_version>_<install_type>_deps
install_<distro>_<distro_version>_deps
install_<distro>_<install_type>_deps
install_<distro>_deps

2. To install salt, which, of course, is required, one of:

install_<distro>_<distro_version>_<install_type>
install_<distro>_<install_type>

3. Optionally, define a minion configuration function, which will be called if the -c|config-dir option is passed. One of:

config_<distro>_<distro_version>_<install_type>_minion
config_<distro>_<distro_version>_minion
config_<distro>_<install_type>_minion
config_<distro>_minion
config_minion [THIS ONE IS ALREADY DEFINED AS THE DEFAULT]

4. Also optionally, define a post install function, one of:

install_<distro>_<distro_versions>_<install_type>_post
install_<distro>_<distro_versions>_post
install_<distro>_<install_type>_post
install_<distro>_post

Below is an example for Ubuntu Oneiric:

install_ubuntu_1110_deps() {
    apt-get update
    apt-get -y install python-software-properties
    add-apt-repository -y 'deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric universe'
    add-apt-repository -y ppa:saltstack/salt
}

install_ubuntu_1110_post() {
    add-apt-repository -y --remove 'deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric universe'
}

install_ubuntu_stable() {
    apt-get -y install salt-minion
}

Since there is no install_ubuntu_1110_stable() it defaults to the unspecified version script.

The bootstrapping script must be plain POSIX sh only, not bash or another shell script. By design the targeting for each operating system and version is very specific. Assumptions of supported versions or variants should not be made, to avoid failed or broken installations.

• Ubuntu 10.x/11.x/12.x
• Debian 6.x
• CentOS 6.3
• Fedora
• Arch
• FreeBSD 9.0