Bootstrapping Minions to Existing Masters#

Heist can be used to bootstrap minions to connect to existing masters and not be connected back through the ssh tunnel. This allows for minions to be deployed and managed to many system in a very streamlined way.

The only change that needs to take place is that bootstrap: True and the master that the target system needs to connect to is defined in minion_opts inside the roster:

hostname:
  username: frank
  password: horsebatterystaple
  bootstrap: True
  minion_opts:
    master: salt

This now tells the minion to deploy the salt minion artifact and connect to the specific master located at the host named salt. When heist is stopped it will not delete anything and will immediately kill the connection. With this approach you will need to manually accept the key on the master that the minions are now communicating with.