salt-minion

Salt managed node agent daemon

TLDR

Start the Salt minion daemon in the foreground

$ salt-minion

Start the Salt minion in the background (daemonized)

$ salt-minion -d

Start with a specific configuration directory

$ salt-minion -c [/etc/salt]

Start with debug logging to console

$ salt-minion -l debug

Start without the keepalive restart wrapper

$ salt-minion --disable-keepalive

salt-minion is the agent daemon that runs on managed systems in a SaltStack infrastructure. It connects to a Salt master, receives commands, executes them locally, and returns results.On startup, the minion generates a key pair and sends its public key to the master for acceptance. Once accepted, the minion subscribes to the master's ZeroMQ publish socket to receive commands. Configuration is stored in /etc/salt/minion or the /etc/salt/minion.d/ directory.The minion can also run in masterless mode using salt-call --local, enabling local configuration management without a master. Setting master_type: disable allows running beacons and engines without master connectivity.

PARAMETERS

-d, --daemon

Run the Salt minion as a daemon in the background

-c DIR, --config-dir=DIR

Specify the configuration directory (default: /etc/salt)

-l LEVEL, --log-level=LEVEL

Console log level: info, warning, error, debug, trace, garbage, quiet (default: warning)

--log-file=FILE

Specify the log file path (default: /var/log/salt/minion)

--log-file-level=LEVEL

Log file logging level

--pidfile=FILE

Specify the location of the pidfile (default: /var/run/salt-minion.pid)

-u USER, --user=USER

Specify user to run salt-minion

--disable-keepalive

Disable automatic restart mechanism; run daemon directly

-h, --help

Print help message and exit

--version

Print version information

CONFIGURATION

/etc/salt/minion

Main minion configuration file defining the master address, minion ID, grains, and module settings.

/etc/salt/minion.d/

Directory for additional configuration files merged with the main config, applied alphabetically.

/var/log/salt/minion

Default minion log file location.

INSTALL

sudo dnf install salt-minion

sudo apk add salt-lts-minion

sudo zypper install salt-minion

CAVEATS

The minion key must be accepted on the master before commands can be executed. By default, the daemon runs with an automatic restart wrapper; use --disable-keepalive when managed by systemd or container runtimes. Configuration in minion.d/ is applied alphabetically, so duplicate settings may override unexpectedly.

HISTORY

salt-minion is part of SaltStack, created by Thomas Hatch in 2011. The minion agent enables Salt's remote execution and configuration management capabilities across infrastructure at scale.