MariaDB DevOps: Installing MariaDB with SaltStack

I have been thinking about how I could streamline my deployment and configuration of MariaDB with salt for a while now. When I decided to give it a shot, I didn’t find any formulas that I liked, so I decided to start writing my own. Currently, my salt formula can deploy MariaDB 5.5, MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5, MariaDB 10.0, or MariaDB Galera Cluster 10.0 to a CentOS 6 or 7 server.

How do I use this formula?

I’ll go through the basic setup process of a SaltStack master and minion on CentOS 7. If you’re curious to know more about salt, check out the documentation.

Set up a salt master

To set up a salt master, first execute the following commands:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install salt-master
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=4505-4506/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload
sudo mkdir -p /srv/salt/
cd /srv/salt/
git clone https://github.com/GeoffMontee/mariadb-saltstack-formula.git

Then add the following to /etc/salt/master:

file_roots:
    base:
        - /srv/salt/mariadb-saltstack-formula

We should also create a top file (which configures the highstate. In this case, let’s set up /srv/salt/mariadb-saltstack-formula/top.sls to make all hosts run MariaDB 10.0 (so they will invoke the mariadb_10_0 state by default):

base:
    '*':
        - mariadb_10_0

Now, start the master (and make sure it always starts on reboot):

sudo chkconfig salt-master on
sudo service salt-master start

Set up a salt minion

To set up a salt minion, first execute the following commands (replace the IP address with that of your master):

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install salt-minion
echo "master: 192.168.1.30" | sudo tee -a /etc/salt/minion
sudo chkconfig salt-minion on
sudo service salt-minion start

Accept the minion’s key

Now that the minion is connecting to the master, the master has to either accept or reject the minion’s public key. Use salt-key for this. First, see which private keys have not been accepted yet:

sudo salt-key -L

If you don’t see anything suspicious, you can accept them all with:

sudo salt-key -A

Deploy MariaDB via salt

In one of the steps above, we setup the top file to make all of our servers use the MariaDB 10.0 state as their highstate. Let’s make them execute their highstate now:

sudo salt '*' state.highstate

If instead, we wanted to deploy a specific version of MariaDB to a particular server, we could do that:

sudo salt '192.168.1.31' state.sls mariadb_galera_10_0

Thoughts?

As I improve my skills with salt, I will probably improve my formulas. Is there anything that you want to see in a formula? Is anyone already doing cool or useful things with salt and MariaDB? Share your thoughts or tips in the comments.