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Salt

Announcing: Into The Salt Mine

I’ve started a new blog that I’d like to announce called Into the Salt Mine. This blog will focus solely on using the suite of free software applications developed by Salt Stack. This includes configuration management, remote execution, cloud provisioning and more. The goal is to provide regular tips and updates on managing systems using Salt and related tools. If you haven’t heard of Salt yet, I’d highly recommend checking out the 30 second summary and consider using Salt to manage your systems.

Creating symlinks with Salt States

This morning I finally found a solution to improving vim-usage on my FreeBSD machines. For the longest time I’ve dealt with little annoyances like arrow-keys entering ABCD characters, and backspace only working in certain situations. As it turns out, all I needed was to import a proper vimrc file. As soon as I had tested the fix, I expanded my vim Salt State to include a symlink to the included example vimrc. states/vim/init.sls: `/root/.vimrc:file.symlink: target: /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/vimrc_example.vim` This state breaks down as follows: /root/.vimrc – File to create file.symlink – Use the symlink function (others include file.managed, and file.directory) -target: /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/vimrc_example.vim – Path to original file Finally I applied the state using the state.sls module, applying only the vim state: [root@starbuck ~]# salt-call state.sls vim<br /> local:<br /> ----------<br /> State: - file<br /> Name: /root/.vimrc<br /> Function: symlink<br /> Result: True<br /> Comment: Created new symlink /root/.vimrc<br /> Changes: new: /root/. Read more