Salt: Target minions by a list from a file

[nbirnel]

Currently salt can target minions in a number of ways. The only "list" way is a comma-delimited list.
A useful target method would be a file containing a list, one per line. This would be similar to the grep -f flag.

I would suggest, to keep with salt's current flag schema, that the flag be -F --file

[mostafahussein]

What about using Node Groups where you can save your minions inside the master configuration as groups.

[nbirnel]

@Code-Vortex Good idea, but not quite what I am looking for. I often need to target a list of minions that I will not know in advance. Usually I have this list as a file - and I can either convert it to a comma delimited list, or run a for-loop in sh/bash on it. Being able to directly target the contents of the file would be a great convenience.

[jfindlay]

@nbirnel, thanks for the feature request.

[benjamintconnelly]

+1

What is the status of this request?

[mostafahussein]

lets say you have the following file minions.txt containing list of minions as follows:

minion_02
minion_03

Now you can call test.ping on these minions by the following command line

salt -L `awk -vORS=, '{ print $1 }' minions.txt | sed 's/,$/\n/'` test.ping

The result would be:

minion_01:
    True
minion_02:
    True
minion_03:
    True

This is just a workaround until we have it as a feature.

[benjamintconnelly]

Excellent! Thank you @mostafahussein

[tlovely]

Given a text file of the name minions.txt in this format:

minion1
minion2
minion3

This command:

salt -L "$(cat minions.txt)" test.ping

Would produce this output:

minion1:
    True
minion2:
    True
minion3:
    True

The -L option, apparently, allows the list of minions to be delimited by commas or newline characters.

[mostafahussein]

@tlovely, could you post the content of your minion.txt ? I guess its a comma separated, am i right ? As the command I have posted above converting a list to comma separated in order to make it work with salt

[tlovely]

@mostafahussein I updated my comment. Thanks.

[nbirnel]

@tlovely That takes care of my use case perfectly. I retract the feature request, but this behavior is undocumented. @jfindlay, should I submit a new documentation issue, or leave this open?

[jfindlay]

@tlovely, or even

salt -L "$(<minions.txt)" test.ping

@nbirnel, it does seem to be documented:

# salt --help | grep -A2 -- '--list'
    -L, --list          Instead of using shell globs to evaluate the target
                        servers, take a comma or space delimited list of
                        servers.

[nbirnel]

@jfindlay I do not read that as documenting newlines.

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