SaltStack Exercise Walkthrough

Step-by-step diagram of a SaltStack configuration management exercise. Traces state application from top.sls through pillar rendering to minion execution, showing each phase of a highstate run.

By Mohamed Habib Jaouadi•March 1, 2026•

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#saltstack

#infrastructure-as-code

#devops

#configuration-management

#highstate

Exercise: Masterless Salt with Vagrant

Follow the six steps to deploy an Nginx web server using Salt in masterless mode inside a Vagrant VM.

Step 1

Create Project Structure

Set up the directory layout with a Vagrantfile and a salt/ directory containing your state files. This is the minimum structure Salt needs to operate in masterless mode.

mkdir my-salt-lab && cd my-salt-lab
mkdir salt
touch Vagrantfile salt/top.sls salt/web.sls

Output

my-salt-lab/
├── Vagrantfile
└── salt/
    ├── top.sls
    └── web.sls

Step 1 of 6