salt-confd 2019.7.0a1

Lightweight Salt package for confd-style management of local application configuration files

Lightweight Salt package for confd style management of local application configuration files.

Why

Please note that the intent of this software package is not to compete against confd or other popular equivalents; it was born purely out of my personal preference / bias of using Salt for managing files (and others). Salt is typically at the opposite end of “lightweight” and this package aims to alleviate this, however it still cannot get better than confd - from this perspective. Alas, it’s written in Python.

If you want, in short, here’s why I took this approach:

1. Why not?

2. It’s fun.

3. I like Salt, and it offers a variety of well-known templating languages to manage the files, including Jinja, Mako, Cheetah, or even pure Python - and others.

4. What I find missing in confd is the possibility to manage the local config files based on more environment parameters - e.g., have idempotent templates that can be used across a number of distributions (as in opposite to having separate files / directory tree / or even repositories for different base operating system distribution); with Salt, this can be very easily done using the Grains.

5. It’s a common practice to provide an alternative to an existing software, in another widely used programming language.

6. Salt covers a large variety of backends to fetch the data from (including Redis, Consul, etcd, and so on).

   Additionally, Salt is easily extensible (not by forking the project), but in your own environment by simply putting the module for your backend of choice under a specific path.

Installation

$ pip install salt-confd