Django Salt API

This Django app serves as a REST API for Salt. It is basically a very thing wrapper around the salt-api package.

Status

The main motivation behind creating a Django package to interface with Salt is that Django is already in our software stack. Since then salt-api has become more flexible in the ways it can be deployed -- it is now possible to deploy its rest_cherrypy module on any compliant WSGI server (in contrast to running salt-api in a separate process). In addition to that there is an even slimmer alternative, though with less features, in the rest_wsgi module. I encourage you to have a look at them before deciding to use django-saltapi.

Since salt-api has solved most of the motivations behind the inception of django-saltapi it is likely that this packages raison d'etre will be to utilize more of the functionality in the Django REST Framework. Future developments will likely be towards this goal.

This package comes with some caveats. This app compared to salt-api:

• this app only supports x-www-form-urlencoded data input for the API wrapper or input snarfed from the URL, whereas salt-api supports other data formats
• this app supports only JSON data output

Note

Currently the API does not require authentication and two API functions are exposed without CSRF protection, though they are harmless from an integrity perspective. See views.py to enable authentication.

Installation

1. Add django_saltapi to your INSTALLED_APPS setting in your project settings.py:

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       [...]
       'django_saltapi',
   )
   

2. Add Salt settings in your project settings.py:

   SALT_CONFIG = {
       'master_config': '/etc/salt/master',
   }
   

2. Include the package URLconf in your project urls.py like so:

   url(r'^api/salt/', include('django_saltapi.urls')),
   

Usage

Note

The documentation and some scripts refer to the host as "salt" where the API is running, YMMV.

1. Visit http://salt/api/salt/ to view the default static HTML page.

2. Issue a Salt ping to all minions via the Salt API wrapper:

   django-saltapi '*' test.ping
   

3. Try out the explicitly exposed REST API functions (see views.py):

   django-saltapi-ping all
   django-saltapi-echo all x
   django-saltapi-job
   django-saltapi-job <jid>
   django-saltapi-minion
   django-saltapi-minion <mid>