SSH Ext Alternatives

In the 2019.2.0 release the ssh_ext_alternatives feature was added. This allows salt-ssh to work across different supported python versions. You will need to ensure you have the following:

  • Salt is installed, with all required dependnecies for the Python version.
  • Everything needs to be importable from the respective Python environment.

To enable using this feature you will need to edit the master configuration similar to below:

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        dependencies:           # List of dependencies and their installation paths
          jinja2: /opt/jinja2
          yaml: /opt/yaml
          tornado: /opt/tornado
          msgpack: /opt/msgpack
          certifi: /opt/certifi
          singledispatch: /opt/singledispatch.py
          singledispatch_helpers: /opt/singledispatch_helpers.py
          markupsafe: /opt/markupsafe
          backports_abc: /opt/backports_abc.py

Warning

When using Salt versions >= 3001 and Python 2 is your py-version you need to use an older version of Salt that supports Python 2. For example, if using Salt-SSH version 3001 and you do not want to install Python 3 on your target host you can use ssh_ext_alternatives's path option. This option needs to point to a 2019.2.3 Salt installation directory on your Salt-SSH host, which still supports Python 2.

auto_detect

In the 3001 release the auto_detect feature was added for ssh_ext_alternatives. This allows salt-ssh to automatically detect the path to all of your dependencies and does not require you to define them under dependencies.

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        auto_detect: True       # Auto detect dependencies
        py_bin: /usr/bin/python2.7 # Python binary path used to auto detect dependencies

If py_bin is not set alongside auto_detect, it will attempt to auto detect the dependnecies using the major version set in py-version. For example if you have [2, 7] set as your py-version, it will attempt to use the binary python2.

You can also use auto_detect and dependencies together.

ssh_ext_alternatives:
    2019.2:                     # Namespace, can be anything.
        py-version: [2, 7]      # Constraint to specific interpreter version
        path: /opt/2019.2/salt  # Main Salt installation directory.
        auto_detect: True       # Auto detect dependencies
        py_bin: /usr/bin/python2.7 # Python binary path to auto detect dependencies
        dependencies:           # List of dependencies and their installation paths
          jinja2: /opt/jinja2

If a dependency is defined in the dependecies list ssh_ext_alternatives will use this dependency, instead of the path that auto_detect finds. For example, if you define /opt/jinja2 under your dependencies for jinja2, it will not try to autodetect the file path to the jinja2 module, and will favor /opt/jinja2.

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