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 0.8.4

salt-api 0.8.4 sees a number of new features and feature enhancements in the `rest_cherrypy` netapi module.

Work to merge salt-api into the main Salt distribution continues and it is likely to be included in Salt's 2014.7.0 release.

## `rest_cherrypy` changes

### Web hooks

This release adds a `new URL /hook` that allows salt-api to serve as a generic web hook interface for Salt. POST requests to the URL trigger events on Salt's event bus.

External services like Amazon SNS, Travis CI, GitHub, etc can easily send signals through Salt's Reactor.

The following HTTP call will trigger the following Salt event.

    % curl -sS http://localhost:8000/hook/some/tag \
        -d some='Data!'

Event tag: `salt/netapi/hook/some/tag`. Event data:

    {
      "_stamp": "2014-04-04T12:14:54.389614",
      "post": {
        "some": "Data!"
      },
      "headers": {
        "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
        "Host": "localhost:8000",
        "User-Agent": "curl/7.32.0",
        "Accept": "*/*",
        "Content-Length": "10",
        "Remote-Addr": "127.0.0.1"
      }
    }

### Batch mode

The `local_batch()` client exposes Salt's batch mode for executing commands on incremental subsets of minions.

### Tests!

We have added the necessary framework for testing the rest_cherrypy module and this release includes a number of both unit and integration tests. The suite can be run with the following command:

    python -m unittest discover -v

### CherryPy server stats and configuration

A number of settings have been added to better configure the performance of the CherryPy web server. In addition, a `new URL /stats` has been added to expose metrics on the health of the CherryPy web server.

### Improvements for running with external WSGI servers

Running the `rest_cherrypy` module via a WSGI-capable server such as Apache or Nginx can be tricky since the user the server is running as must have permission to access the running Salt system. This release eases some of those restrictions by accessing Salt's key interface through the external auth system. Read access to the Salt configuration is required for the user the server is running as and everything else should go through external auth.

### More information in the jobs URLs

The output for the `/jobs/` has been augmented with more information about the job such as which minions are expected to return for that job. This same output will be added to the other salt-api URLs in the next release.

### Improvements to the Server Sent Events stream

Event tags have been added to `the HTTP event stream` as SSE tags which allows JavaScript or other consumers to more easily match on certain tags without having to inspect the whole event.