salt/doc/topics/targeting/compound.rst

Compound matchers

Compound matchers allow very granular minion targeting using any of Salt's matchers. The default matcher is a glob <python2:fnmatch> match, just as with CLI and top file matching. To match using anything other than a glob, prefix the match string with the appropriate letter from the table below, followed by an @ sign.

Letter	Match Type	Example	Alt Delimiter? <target-alt-delimiters>
G	Grains glob	G@os:Ubuntu	Yes
E	PCRE Minion ID	E@web\d+\.(dev|qa|prod)\.loc	No
P	Grains PCRE	P@os:(RedHat|Fedora|CentOS)	Yes
L	List of minions	L@minion1.example.com,minion3.domain.com or bl*.domain.com	No
I	Pillar glob	I@pdata:foobar	Yes
J	Pillar PCRE	J@pdata:^(foo|bar)$	Yes
S	Subnet/IP address	S@192.168.1.0/24 or S@192.168.1.100	No
R	Range cluster	R@%foo.bar	No
N	Nodegroups	N@group1	No

Matchers can be joined using boolean and, or, and not operators.

For example, the following string matches all Debian minions with a hostname that begins with webserv, as well as any minions that have a hostname which matches the regular expression <python2:re> web-dc1-srv.*:

salt -C 'webserv* and G@os:Debian or E@web-dc1-srv.*' test.version

That same example expressed in a top file looks like the following:

base:
  'webserv* and G@os:Debian or E@web-dc1-srv.*':
    - match: compound
    - webserver

2015.8.0

Excluding a minion based on its ID is also possible:

salt -C 'not web-dc1-srv' test.version

Versions prior to 2015.8.0 a leading not was not supported in compound matches. Instead, something like the following was required:

salt -C '* and not G@kernel:Darwin' test.version

Excluding a minion based on its ID was also possible:

salt -C '* and not web-dc1-srv' test.version

Precedence Matching

Matchers can be grouped together with parentheses to explicitly declare precedence amongst groups.

salt -C '( ms-1 or G@id:ms-3 ) and G@id:ms-3' test.version

Note

Be certain to note that spaces are required between the parentheses and targets. Failing to obey this rule may result in incorrect targeting!

Alternate Delimiters

2015.8.0

Matchers that target based on a key value pair use a colon (:) as a delimiter. Matchers with a Yes in the Alt Delimiters column in the previous table support specifying an alternate delimiter character.

This is done by specifying an alternate delimiter character between the leading matcher character and the @ pattern separator character. This avoids incorrect interpretation of the pattern in the case that : is part of the grain or pillar data structure traversal.

salt -C 'J|@foo|bar|^foo:bar$ or J!@gitrepo!https://github.com:example/project.git' test.ping