# Salt Project

- Latest Salt Documentation

- Open an issue (bug report, feature request, etc.)

Salt is the world's fastest, most intelligent and scalable automation engine.

## About Salt

Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Use Salt to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of your infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.

Salt has many possible uses, including configuration management, which involves:

- Managing operating system deployment and configuration.

- Installing and configuring software applications and services.

- Managing servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, web servers, network devices, and more.

- Ensuring consistent configuration and preventing configuration drift.

Salt is ideal for configuration management because it is pluggable, customizable, and plays well with many existing technologies. Salt enables you to deploy and manage applications that use any tech stack running on nearly any operating system, including different types of network devices such as switches and routers from a variety of vendors.

In addition to configuration management Salt can also:

- Automate and orchestrate routine IT processes, such as common required tasks for scheduled server downtimes or upgrading operating systems or applications.

- Create self-aware, self-healing systems that can automatically respond to outages, common administration problems, or other important events.

## About our sponsors

Salt powers VMware's VMware Aria Automation Config (previously vRealize Automation SaltStack Config / SaltStack Enterprise), and can be found under the hood of products from Juniper, Cisco, Cloudflare, Nutanix, SUSE, and Tieto, to name a few.

The original sponsor of our community, SaltStack, was acquired by VMware in 2020. The Salt Project remains an open source ecosystem that VMware supports and contributes to. VMware ensures the code integrity and quality of the Salt modules by acting as the official sponsor and manager of the Salt project. Many of the core Salt Project contributors are also VMware employees. This team carefully reviews and enhances the Salt modules to ensure speed, quality, and security.

## Download and install Salt

Salt is tested and packaged to run on CentOS, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, MacOS, Windows, and more. Download Salt and get started now. See supported operating systems for more information.

To download and install Salt, see: * The Salt install guide * Salt Project repository

## Technical support

Report bugs or problems using Salt by opening an issue: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues

To join our community forum where you can exchange ideas, best practices, discuss technical support questions, and talk to project maintainers, join our Slack workspace: Salt Project Community Slack

## Salt Project documentation

Installation instructions, tutorials, in-depth API and module documentation:

- The Salt install guide

- The Salt user guide

- Latest Salt documentation

- Salt's contributing guide

## Security advisories

Keep an eye on the Salt Project Security Announcements landing page. Salt Project recommends subscribing to the Salt Project Security RSS feed to receive notification when new information is available regarding security announcements.

Other channels to receive security announcements include the Salt Community mailing list and the Salt Project Community Slack.

### Responsibly reporting security vulnerabilities

When reporting security vulnerabilities for Salt or other SaltStack projects, refer to the SECURITY.md file found in this repository.

## Join our community

Salt is built by the Salt Project community, which includes more than 3,000 contributors working in roles just like yours. This well-known and trusted community works together to improve the underlying technology and extend Salt by creating a variety of execution and state modules to accomplish the most common tasks or solve the most important problems that people in your role are likely to face.

If you want to help extend Salt or solve a problem with Salt, you can join our community and contribute today.

Please be sure to review our Code of Conduct. Also, check out some of our community resources including:

- Salt Project Community Wiki

- Salt Project Community Slack

- Salt Project: IRC on LiberaChat

- Salt Project YouTube channel

- Salt Project Twitch channel

There are lots of ways to get involved in our community. Every month, there are around a dozen opportunities to meet with other contributors and the Salt Core team and collaborate in real time. The best way to keep track is by subscribing to the Salt Project Community Events Calendar on the main https://saltproject.io website.

If you have additional questions, email us at saltproject@vmware.com or reach out directly to the Community Manager, Jimmy Chunga via Slack. We'd be glad to have you join our community!

## License

Salt is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Please see the LICENSE file for the full text of the Apache license, followed by a full summary of the licensing used by external modules.

A complete list of attributions and dependencies can be found here: salt/DEPENDENCIES.md