List salt minions in template

Update: I revisited this topic recently and since there's the Salt Mine this can be done in better ways, check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17158665/ for different approaches.

This seems to be a common task with saltstack but I couldn't find a really good answer yet: How does one minion get a targeted list of minions for a template? In my case I wanted to populate the backup server's config file with all minions with the backupclient role.

I came up with the following solution that uses peer communication and a custom module. This is my module:

# states/_modules/backuppc.py

def get_clients():
    """
    Request backuppc.is_client() from all minions
    """
    return __salt__['publish.publish']('*', 'backuppc.is_client')

def is_client():
    """
    Check if this minion has the backupclient role grain
    """
    ret = False
    if 'roles' in __grains__:
        if 'backupclient' in __grains__['roles']:
            ret = True
    return ret

The backup server needs access to the is_client() function to be able to build the hosts config file, so the minions must publish it. The peer configuration in the master config file has to contain something like:

peer:
  .*:
    - backuppc.is_client

Ideally the clients would publish this info only to the master, but this doesn't seem possible with this method.

The configuration template with the hosts list contains a loop like this:

{% for host, enabled in salt['backuppc.get_clients']().iteritems() %}
    {%- if enabled %}
        {{- host }} foo
    {%- endif %}
{% endfor %}

Conclusion

I'm not really happy with this solution. The peer communication seems superfluous, but I couldn't find a better way. The master can easily target minions by grains, but I couldn't find a way to get this info into a minion's template.

Salt 0.15 introduced the mine module which could be used to make this solution more scalable.

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