# Salt Cloud 0.8.4 Release Notes

Welcome to 0.8.4! Aside from various bug fixes, the most important improvements in this release are to the deploy scripts. Read on to see what's happened.

## Documentation

The documentation for Salt Cloud can be found on Read the Docs: https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.io

## Download

Salt Cloud can be downloaded and install via pypi:

https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.4.tar.gz

Some packages have been made available for salt-cloud and more on their way. Packages for Arch and FreeBSD are being made available thanks to the work of Christer Edwards, and packages for RHEL and Fedora are being created by Clint Savage. The Ubuntu PPA is being managed by Sean Channel. Package availability will be announced on the salt mailing list.

## Salt Bootstrap

By far the biggest change to Salt Cloud is the inclusion of the salt-bootstrap script, made possible by the genius of Alec Koumjian and Pedro Algarvio. From this point on, each release of Salt Cloud will include the latest stable version of bootstrap-salt-minion.sh in the deploy folder. This is a generic, POSIX-compliant deployment script, which autodetects your OS, and installs the latest version of Salt accordingly. For more information, see:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap

To use this deploy script explicitly, set the script option to bootstrap-salt-minion in the profile for your VM. For instance:

    aws-archlinux:
        provider: aws
        image: ami-0356da6a
        size: Micro Instance
        script: bootstrap-salt-minion
        ssh_username: root

For those of you still using "os" in your profiles, it should be noted that this option was renamed to "script" in 0.8.2, and your configuration should be updated accordingly.

## Optional Script Option

As mentioned above, usage of the "os" argument has been deprecated in favor of the "script" argument. However, "script" is now optional. If you do not specify this option, salt-cloud will default to bootstrap-salt-minion for you. If you do not want any deployment scripts run, you still have the following options available to you.

From the command line, use the --no-deploy option:

    salt-cloud --no-deploy -p myprofile mymachine

In the Salt Cloud configuration, set:

    deploy: False

Or in the profile, set the script option to None:

    script: None

## Other Generic Deploy Scripts

If you want to be assured of always using the latest Salt Bootstrap script, there are now a few generic templates available in the deploy directory of your saltcloud source tree:

    curl-bootstrap
    curl-bootstrap-git
    python-bootstrap
    wget-bootstrap
    wget-bootstrap-git

These are example scripts which were designed to be customized, adapted, and refit to meet your needs. One important use of them is to pass options to the salt-bootstrap script, such as updating to specific git tags.