Debian Installation

Currently the latest packages for Debian are published in Martin F. Krafft's personal debian.org repository.

Confiure Apt

Setup apt to install Salt from the repository and use Debian's stable (squeeze) backports for dependencies:

for i in salt-{common,master,minion,syndic,doc} sysvinit-utils; do
echo "Package: $i"
echo "Pin: release a=squeeze-backports"
echo "Pin-Priority: 600"
echo
done > /etc/apt/preferences.d/local-salt-backport.pref

Add repository

Add the repository to the list of sources:

cat <<_eof > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/local-madduck-backports.list
    deb http://debian.madduck.net/repo squeeze-backports main
    deb-src http://debian.madduck.net/repo squeeze-backports main
_eof

Import the repository key.

wget -q -O- "http://debian.madduck.net/repo/gpg/archive.key" | apt-key add -

Note

You can optionally verify the key integrity with sha512sum using the public key signature shown here. E.g:

echo "8b1983fc2d2c55c83e2bbc15d93c3fc090c8e0e92c04ece555a6b6d8ff26de8b4fc2ccbe1bbd16a6357ff86b8b69fd261e90d61350e07a518d50fc9f5f0a1eb3 archive.key" | sha512sum -c

Update the package database:

apt-get update

Install packages

Install the Salt master, minion, or syndic from the repository with the apt-get command. These examples each install one daemon, but more than one package name may be given at a time:

apt-get install salt-master

apt-get install salt-minion

apt-get install salt-syndic

Post-installation tasks

Now go to the Configuring Salt page.

Packages from Source

To build your own salt Debian packages on squeeze use:

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
EOF
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential fakeroot
apt-get install python-argparse python-zmq
apt-get -t squeeze-backports install debhelper python-sphinx

After installing the necessary dependencies build the packages with:

git clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt.git
cd salt
fakeroot debian/rules binary

You will need to install the salt-common package along with the salt-minion or salt-master packages. For example:

dpkg -i salt-common_<version>.deb salt-minion<version>.deb
apt-get -f install

The last command pulls in the required dependencies for your salt packages.

For more information how to use debian-backports see http://backports-master.debian.org/Instructions/