The Salt system setup is amazingly simple, as this is one of the central design goals of Salt.
See also
Installing Salt for development and contributing to the project.
Many popular distributions will be able to install the salt minion by executing the bootstrap script:
wget -O - http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh
Run the following script to install just the Salt Master:
curl -L http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh -s -- -M -N
The script should also make it simple to install a salt master, if desired.
Currently the install script has been tested to work on:
See Salt Bootstrap for more information.
These guides go into detail how to install salt on a given platform.
Salt should run on any Unix-like platform so long as the dependencies are met.
When upgrading Salt, the master(s) should always be upgraded first. Backwards compatibility for minions running newer versions of salt than their masters is not guaranteed.
Whenever possible, backwards compatibility between new masters and old minions will be preserved. Generally, the only exception to this policy is in case of a security vulnerability.
Current Salt release: 2014.1.6
Docs for previous releases on salt.rtfd.org.