salt/doc/topics/tutorials/standalone_minion.rst

=================
Standalone Minion
=================

Since the Salt minion contains such extensive functionality it can be useful
to run it standalone. A standalone minion can be used to do a number of
things:

- Stand up a master server via States (Salting a Salt Master)
- Use salt-call commands on a system without connectivity to a master
- Masterless States, run states entirely from files local to the minion

Telling Salt Call to Run Masterless
===================================

The salt-call command is used to run module functions locally on a minion
instead of executing them from the master. Normally the salt-call command
checks into the master to retrieve file server and pillar data, but when running
standalone salt-call needs to be instructed to not check the master for this
data. To instruct the minion to not look for a master when running salt-call
the ``file_client`` configuration option needs to be set. By default the
``file_client`` is set to ``remote`` so that the minion knows that file server
and pillar data are to be gathered from the master. When setting the
``file_client`` option to ``local`` the minion is configured to not gather
this data from the master.

.. code-block:: yaml

    file_client: local

Now the salt-call command will not look for a master and will assume that the
local system has all of the file ad pillar resources.



Running States Masterless
=========================

The state system can be easily run without a Salt master, with all needed files
local to the minion. To do this the minion configuration file needs to be set
up to know how to return file_roots information like the master. The file_roots
setting defaults to /srv/salt for the base environment just like on the master:

.. code-block:: yaml

    file_roots:
      base:
        - /srv/salt

Now set up the Salt State Tree, top file, and SLS modules in the same way that
they would be set up on a master. Now, with the ``file_client`` option set to
``local`` and an available state tree then calls to functions in the state
module will use the information in the file_roots on the minion instead of
checking in with the master.

Remember that when creating a state tree on a minion there are no syntax or
path changes needed, SLS modules written to be used from a master do not need
to be modified in any way to work with a minion.

This makes it easy to "script" deployments with Salt states without having to
set up a master, and allows for these SLS modules to be easily moved into a
Salt master as the deployment grows.

Now the declared state can now be executed with::
    
    salt-call state.highstate

Or the salt-call command can be executed with the `--local` flag, this makes it
unnecessary to change the configuration file::

    salt-call state.highstate --loca