Salt has full support for running the Salt Minion on Windows.
There are no plans for the foreseeable future to develop a Salt Master on Windows. For now you must run your Salt Master on a supported operating system to control your Salt Minions on Windows.
Many of the standard Salt modules have been ported to work on Windows and many of the Salt States currently work on Windows, as well.
Salt Minion Windows installers can be found here. The output of md5sum <salt minion exe> should match the contents of the corresponding md5 file.
Download here
Note
The executables above will install dependencies that the Salt minion requires.
The 64bit installer has been tested on Windows 7 64bit and Windows Server 2008R2 64bit. The 32bit installer has been tested on Windows 2003 Server 32bit. Please file a bug report on our GitHub repo if issues for other platforms are found.
The installer asks for 2 bits of information; the master hostname and the minion name. The installer will update the minion config with these options and then start the minion.
The salt-minion service will appear in the Windows Service Manager and can be started and stopped there or with the command line program sc like any other Windows service.
If the minion won't start, try installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 x64 SP1 redistributable. Allow all Windows updates to run salt-minion smoothly.
The installer can be run silently by providing the /S option at the command line. The options /master and /minion-name allow for configuring the master hostname and minion name, respectively. Here's an example of using the silent installer:
Salt-Minion-0.17.0-Setup-amd64.exe /S /master=yoursaltmaster /minion-name=yourminionname
Install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable, vcredist_x86 or vcredist_x64.
Install msysgit
Clone the Salt git repository from GitHub
git clone git://github.com/saltstack/salt.git
Install the latest point release of Python 2.7 for the architecture you wish to target
Add C:\Python27 and C:\Python27\Scripts to your system path
Download and run the Setuptools bootstrap - ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py
Install Pip
easy_install pip
Install the latest point release of OpenSSL for Windows
Install the latest point release of M2Crypto
Install the latest point release of pycrypto
Install the latest point release of pywin32
Install the latest point release of Cython
Install the latest point release of jinja2
Install the latest point release of msgpack
Install psutil
easy_install psutil
Install pyzmq
easy_install pyzmq
Install PyYAML
easy_install pyyaml
Install bbfreeze
easy_install bbfreeze
Install wmi
pip install wmi
Install esky
pip install esky
Install Salt
cd salt
python setup.py install
Build a frozen binary distribution of Salt
python setup.py bdist_esky
A zip file has been created in the dist/ folder, containing a frozen copy of Python and the dependency libraries, along with Windows executables for each of the Salt scripts.
The Salt Windows installer is built with the open-source NSIS compiler. The source for the installer is found in the pkg directory of the Salt repo here: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/pkg/windows/installer/Salt-Minion-Setup.nsi. To create the installer, extract the frozen archive from dist/ into pkg/windows/buildenv/ and run NSIS.
The NSIS installer can be found here: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
Create the directory C:\salt (if it doesn't exist already)
Copy the example conf and var directories from pkg/windows/buildenv/ into C:\salt
Edit C:\salt\conf\minion
master: ipaddress or hostname of your salt-master
Start the salt-minion
cd C:\Python27\Scripts
python salt-minion
On the salt-master accept the new minion's key
sudo salt-key -A
This accepts all unaccepted keys. If you're concerned about security just accept the key for this specific minion.
Test that your minion is responding
On the salt-master run:
sudo salt '*' test.ping
You should get the following response: {'your minion hostname': True}
On a 64 bit Windows host the following script makes an unattended install of salt, including all dependencies:
Not up to date.
This script is not up to date. Please use the installer found above
# (All in one line.)
"PowerShell (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://csa-net.dk/salt/bootstrap64.bat','C:\bootstrap.bat');(New-Object -com Shell.Application).ShellExecute('C:\bootstrap.bat');"
You can execute the above command remotely from a Linux host using winexe:
winexe -U "administrator" //fqdn "PowerShell (New-Object ......);"
For more info check http://csa-net.dk/salt
On windows Server 2003, you need to install optional component "wmi windows installer provider" to have full list of installed packages. If you don't have this, salt-minion can't report some installed softwares.
Docs for previous releases are available on salt.rtfd.org.
Latest Salt release: 2014.7.1
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