How do I pass parameters to a salt state file?

Question

I want to create a group and user using salt state files, but I do not know the group, gid, user, uid, sshkey until I need to execute the salt state file which I would like to pass in as parameters.

I have read about Pillar to create the variable. How do I create pillars before execution?

/srv/salt/group.sls:

{{ name }}:
  group.present:
    - gid: {{ gid }}
    - system: True

Command line:

salt 'SaltStack-01' state.sls group name=awesome gid=123456

score 24 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 31 '23 at 19:28

24

If you really want to pass in the data on the command like you can also do it like this:

{{ pillar['name'] }}:
  group.present:
    - gid: {{ pillar['gid'] }}
    - system: True

Then on the command line you can pass in the data like this:

salt 'SaltStack-01' state.sls group pillar='{"name": "awesome", "gid": "123456"}'

edited Jan 31 '23 at 19:28

Josh Correia

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answered Jul 11 '17 at 23:00

Utah_Dave

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1

This is the answer I was looking for when I asked the question all those years ago. The accepted answer is probably best practice tho. Thanks Dave! – Ryan Currah Jul 12 '17 at 13:46

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 13 '16 at 06:04

You use Pillars to create "dictionaries" that you can reference into State files. I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but here's an example of what you can do:

mkdir /srv/pillar/
Create /srv/pillar/groups.sls and paste something like this into it:
```
groups:
  first: 1234
  second: 5678
```
These are names and GIDs of the groups you want to create.
Create /srv/pillar/top.sls so you can apply this pillar to your minions. This is very similar to a salt top file, so you can either apply it to all minions ('*') or just the one ('SaltStack-01'):
```
base:
  'hc01*':
    - groups
```
To test that that has worked, you can run salt '*' pillar.items and you should find the groups pillar somewhere in the output.
Now, your /srv/salt/group.sls file should look like this:
```
{% for group,gid in pillar.get('groups',{}).items() %}
{{ group }}:
  group.present:
    - gid: {{ gid }}
{% endfor %}
```
This is a for loop: for every group and gid in the pillar groups, do the rest. So basically, you can look at it as if the state file is running twice:
```
first:
  group.present:
    - gid: 1234
```
And then:
```
second:
  group.present:
    - gid: 5678
```

This was incorporated from this guide.

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited May 11 '23 at 08:29

5

if you do not want use Pillar
you can do as:

# /srv/salt/params.yaml

name: awesome
gid: 123456

and then:

# /srv/salt/groups.sls

{% import_yaml "params.yaml" as params %}

{{ params['name'] }}:
  group.present:
    - gid: {{ params['gid'] }}
    - system: True

more details:doc

edited May 11 '23 at 08:29

sshow

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answered Jul 05 '17 at 10:21

Hohenheim

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Mercury · Answer 4 · 2021-01-29T00:17:36.403

Another nice way to pass (incase you don't want to use pillars Nor create a file as other answers shows) - you can pass a local environment variable to salt and read it from within the sls file, like this:

Command:

MYVAR=world salt 'SaltStack-01' state.sls somesalt   # Note the env variable passed at the beginning

sls file:

# /srv/salt/somesalt.sls

foo:
  cmd.run:
    - name: |
        echo "hello {{ salt['environ.get']('MYVAR') }}"

Will print to stdout:

hello world

Another good thing to know is that the env variable also gets passed on to any included salt states as well.

How do I pass parameters to a salt state file?

4 Answers4