Note
This project has moved.
Using HashiCorp Vagrant to run a portable, redeployable Salt lab environment on my Chromebook.
The included Vagrantfile spawns a environment with a single Salt Master (named salt) and four Salt Minions (named minion##) running different common Linux distributions for learning, testing, and development. It leverages the libvirt provider to interact with native Linux virtualization, and has a few tweaks to work around limitations imposed by running this all within ChromeOS's LXC-based Linux development environment.
To make it easier to deploy, test, break, tear down, and redeploy the environment:
- The Salt master blindly auto-accepts all minion keys.
- The minions register the
roles:saltlabgrain to aid in targeting. - The master uses
gitfsto pull the starter Salt content from this very Github repo. - Additionally, the contents of
salt_content/localgetrsynced to/srv/when the master starts up to make it easier to write/test Salt content locally. This is a one-wayrsyncfrom host to VM (and not the other way around), so make sure to write your Salt content on the host and usevagrant rsyncto push changes into the VM.
See the blog post for full details on how I've configured my environment.
Here's the crash course:
- Verify support for nested virtualization:
ls -l /dev/kvm- Install prerequisites:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install \
build-essential \
gpg \
lsb-release \
rsync \
wget- Install
virt-managerandlibvirt-dev:
sudo apt install virt-manager libvirt-dev- Configure libvirt:
sudo gpasswd -a $USER libvirt ; newgrp libvirt
echo "remember_owner = 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf
echo "namespaces = []" | sudo tee -a /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf
sudo systemctl restart libvirtd- Install Vagrant
wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install vagrant- Install
vagrant-libvirtplugin:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirtClone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/jbowdre/vagrant-saltlab.git
cd vagrant-saltlabReview the Vagrantfile, and adjust CPU_COUNT and MEMORY_MB if needed. Note that some of the machines won't function correctly with less than 1024 MB.
vim VagrantfileProvision the virtual environment:
vagrant upThe master and four minions will be deployed; this will take several minutes. Once complete, you can verify status with vagrant status:
vagrant status
Current machine states:
salt running (libvirt) # master, ubuntu 22.04
minion01 running (libvirt) # ubuntu 22.04
minion02 running (libvirt) # ubuntu 20.04
minion03 running (libvirt) # rocky 8
minion04 running (libvirt) # rocky 9
This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state. For more information about a specific
VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.Access an SSH shell on the master with vagrant ssh salt:
vagrant ssh salt
Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.15.0-83-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/pro
System information as of Tue Feb 6 04:28:02 PM UTC 2024
System load: 0.072265625 Processes: 104
Usage of /: 14.3% of 30.34GB Users logged in: 0
Memory usage: 59% IPv4 address for eth0: 192.168.121.69
Swap usage: 0% IPv4 address for eth1: 192.168.100.120
This system is built by the Bento project by Chef Software
More information can be found at https://github.com/chef/bento
Last login: Tue Feb 6 14:37:44 2024 from 192.168.121.1
vagrant@salt:~$Verify that all the minion keys have been automatically accepted by the master (this is a lab environment, after all):
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt-key -L
Accepted Keys:
minion01
minion02
minion03
minion04
salt
Denied Keys:
Unaccepted Keys:
Rejected Keys:Make sure all the minions are responding correctly:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt '*' test.ping
salt:
True
minion03:
True
minion02:
True
minion01:
True
minion04:
TrueAnd confirm that the local and remote content has been successfully merged into the salt:// file system:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt-run fileserver.file_list
- _reactor/sync_grains.sls # gitfs
- neofetch/init.sls # local
- neofetch/uninstall.sls # local
- top.sls # gitfs
- users/init.sls # gitfs
- vim/init.sls # gitfs
- vim/uninstall.sls # gitfs
- vim/vimrc # gitfs
- webserver/index.html # gitfs
- webserver/init.sls # gitfs
- webserver/uninstall.sls # gitfsYou can then apply a state like so:
vagrant@salt:~$ sudo salt '*' state.apply neofetchHappy Salting!
To blow it all away for a fresh start, just run vagrant destroy -f. You can then re-do vagrant up.