salt/doc/ref/publisheracl.rst

Publisher ACL system

The salt publisher ACL system is a means to allow system users other than root to have access to execute select salt commands on minions from the master.

The publisher ACL system is configured in the master configuration file via the publisher_acl configuration option. Under the publisher_acl configuration option the users open to send commands are specified and then a list of regular expressions which specify the minion functions which will be made available to specified user. This configuration is much like the peer configuration:

publisher_acl:
  # Allow thatch to execute anything.
  thatch:
    - .*
  # Allow fred to use test and pkg, but only on "web*" minions.
  fred:
    - web*:
      - test.*
      - pkg.*
  # Allow managers to use saltutil module functions
  manager_.*:
    - saltutil.*

Permission Issues

Directories required for publisher_acl must be modified to be readable by the users specified:

chmod 755 /var/cache/salt /var/cache/salt/master /var/cache/salt/master/jobs /var/run/salt /var/run/salt/master

Note

In addition to the changes above you will also need to modify the permissions of /var/log/salt and the existing log file to be writable by the user(s) which will be running the commands. If you do not wish to do this then you must disable logging or Salt will generate errors as it cannot write to the logs as the system users.

If you are upgrading from earlier versions of salt you must also remove any existing user keys and re-start the Salt master:

rm /var/cache/salt/.*key
service salt-master restart

Whitelist and Blacklist

Salt's authentication systems can be configured by specifying what is allowed using a whitelist, or by specifying what is disallowed using a blacklist. If you specify a whitelist, only specified operations are allowed. If you specify a blacklist, all operations are allowed except those that are blacklisted.

See publisher_acl and publisher_acl_blacklist.