These release notes are for an old release of Salt. This release might contain known security and other issues that are fixed in the latest release.

# salt-api 0.8.3

salt-api 0.8.3 is a small release largely concerning changes and fixes to the `rest_cherrypy` netapi module.

This release will likely be the final salt-api release as a separate project. The Salt team has begun the process of merging this project directly in to the main Salt project. What this means for end users is only that there will be one fewer package to install. Salt itself will ship with the current `netapi` modules and the API and configuration will remain otherwise unchanged.

The reasoning behind merging the two projects is simply to lower the barrier to entry. Having a separate project was useful for experimentation and exploration but there was no technical reason for the separation -- salt-api uses the same flexible module system that Salt uses and those modules will simply be moved into Salt.

Going forward, Salt will ship with the same REST interface that salt-api currently provides. This will have the side benefit of not having to coordinate incompatible Salt and salt-api releases.

## `rest_cherrypy` changes

An HTTP stream of Salt's event bus has been added. This stream conforms to the SSE (Server Sent Events) spec and is easily consumed via JavaScript clients. This HTTP stream allows a real-time window into a running Salt system. A client watching the stream can see as soon as individual minions return data for a job, authentication events, and any other events that go through the Salt master.

A new configuration option to only allow access to whitelisted IP addresses. Of course, IP addresses can be easily spoofed so this feature should be thought of as a usability addition and not used for security purposes.

An option to disable SSL has been added. Previously SSL could only be disabled while running the HTTP server with debugging options enabled. Now each item can be enabled or disabled independently of the other.

In addition, there has been several bug fixes, packaging fixes, and minor code simplification.