Pillar support?

[dizzythinks]

Looking through the example I see it's doing general state stuff. Does it support accessing pillar information as well?

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks We haven't needed SaltStack pillar support, but this could be added pretty easily.

The reason we haven't needed pillar support is that we're using this to build Docker images that would be instantiated later (build time), rather than being managed by Salt when they are running (run time). But I can see that it might be handy to put some configuration options in pillars.

What do you want to do with the pillars? What would you need it for?

[dizzythinks]

I was thinking specifically of using masterless pillar at build time for things like nginx config files where I might want to use different values for things like paths to SSL certs, server name variables etc based on different environments potentially, or just generally the ability to use Jinja.

I have a fairly rich repository for saltstack already that uses a number of template driven methods to configure and am looking to do a migration piece to docker and would like to minimise potential rewrite of things.

[dizzythinks]

Sorry when I say build time I mean building a container that has relevant configuration included that is built from Jinja templating in some cases.

[dizzythinks]

Being able to use the nginx formula is a good example of where pillar support would be handy.

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks So you would like to have pillar files copied to the right place on the minion then? Would you be willing to share a repo or point me at an example that uses pillars that I could use to try out some code?

[dizzythinks]

Yeah, basically I was thinking that in the example where there is is the salt folder there could also be a pillar folder. I can create a little sample for you tomorrow to have a look at as I'm in the UK. Will drop a link in here in the morning if that's ok. Really appreciate you taking the time to look!

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks It would be great if you could send an example! What would be great is some sls/pillar files that you know work, and with a sentence or two about what you would like to have happen with FlyingCloud. If you can do that I can think about how to implement it and maybe take a shot at adding this-

[dizzythinks]

Hi, I have thrown some really simple example of what I was thinking up here: https://github.com/dizzythinks/flyingcloud-example

Let me know if its not enough or sufficient.

Thanks again

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks Thanks for the example - that should be sufficient. I will take a shot at it and let you know when I have something that works so you can try it out.

[georgevreilly]

Sounds like a great idea. I'm going to leave this in @adamfeuer's hands for now.

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks I added your example to this branch: https://github.com/cookbrite/flyingcloud/tree/feature/pillar-support/examples/nginx-pillar

I'm going to give it a try now... might take a bit before I get something working.

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks Seems each pillar should be a directory, with its own top.sls file that can include other pillar .sls files, so that on the docker container they will be located at /srv/salt/pillar/top.sls, like the example here: pillar walkthrough. This is a little different from what you are thinking- you had each pillar be a self-contained file, but that doesn't quite match the docs.

I'm going to do it the way shown in the SaltStack example- but am open to doing it differently, let me know your thoughts.

[dizzythinks]

No that's cool, my example was more for easy demarcation in the repo, but with the idea that pillar/dev/top.sls or pillar/qa/top/sls could be mounted into the container as /srv/salt/pillar/top.sls so all good thanks as I can handle that on the CI side.

[adamfeuer]

@dizzythinks Ok got basic pillar support working on this branch. You can pull it and try to build the example. Here's the workflow:

cd examples/nginx-pillar
# build the base layer
flyingcloud --debug --build sysbase 
# build the nginx pillar example using the pillar configured in its layer.yaml file
flyingcloud --debug --build nginx
# build the nginx pillar example, specifying the qa pillar to override what is in the layer.yaml
flyingcloud --debug --pillar qa --build nginx

The example underwent some changes to get it working, will you look at it to see if it will work for you?

[dizzythinks]

Thanks @adamfeuer I will get on to this today and try it out.