# Salt Proxy Minion End-to-End Example

The following is walkthrough that documents how to run a sample REST service and configure one or more proxy minions to talk to and control it.

1. Ideally, create a Python virtualenv in which to run the REST service. This is not strictly required, but without a virtualenv you will need to install `bottle` via pip globally on your system

2. Clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt-contrib and copy the contents of the directory `proxyminion_rest_example` somewhere on a machine that is reachable from the machine on which you want to run the salt-proxy. This machine needs Python 2.7 or later.

3. Install bottle version 0.12.8 via pip or easy_install

    pip install bottle==0.12.8

4. Run `python rest.py --help` for usage

5. Start the REST API on an appropriate port and IP.

6. Load the REST service's status page in your browser by going to the IP/port combination (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8000)

7. You should see a page entitled "Salt Proxy Minion" with two sections, one for "services" and one for "packages" and you should see a log entry in the terminal where you started the REST process indicating that the index page was retrieved.

Now, configure your salt-proxy.

1. Edit `/etc/salt/proxy` and add an entry for your master's location

    master: localhost

2. On your salt-master, ensure that pillar is configured properly. Select an ID for your proxy (in this example we will name the proxy with the letter 'p' followed by the port the proxy is answering on). In your pillar topfile, place an entry for your proxy:

    base:
      'p8000':
        - p8000

This says that Salt's pillar should load some values for the proxy `p8000` from the file `/srv/pillar/p8000.sls` (if you have not changed your default pillar_roots)

3. In the pillar root for your base environment, create the `p8000.sls` file with the following contents:

    proxy:
      proxytype: rest_sample
      url: http://<IP your REST listens on>:port

In other words, if your REST service is listening on port 8000 on 127.0.0.1 the 'url' key above should say `url: http://127.0.0.1:8000`

4. Make sure your salt-master is running.

5. Start the salt-proxy in debug mode

    salt-proxy --proxyid=p8000 -l debug

6. Accept your proxy's key on your salt-master

    salt-key -y -a p8000
    The following keys are going to be accepted:
    Unaccepted Keys:
    p8000
    Key for minion p8000 accepted.

7. Now you should be able to ping your proxy. When you ping, you should see a log entry in the terminal where the REST service is running.

    salt p8000 test.version

8. The REST service implements a degenerately simple pkg and service provider as well as a small set of grains. To "install" a package, use a standard `pkg.install`. If you pass '==' and a version number after the package name then the service will parse that and accept that as the package's version.

9. Try running `salt p8000 grains.items` to see what grains are available. You can target proxies via grains if you like.

10. You can also start and stop the available services (apache, redbull, and postgresql with `service.start`, etc.

11. States can be written to target the proxy. Feel free to experiment with them.