Salt-Stack exclude minions from salt '*' state.apply in top.sls

Question

Is there a way to exclude minions from being targeted even if I run salt '*' state.apply on CLI?

Ideally the exclusion should be declared somewhere in top.sls

Answer 1

You want to use compound matching. Targetting all the minions for the webserver states except minion_id_1 can be done like this.

base:
  'not minion_id_1':
    - match: compound
    - webserver

Documentation on compound matching can be found here: docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/targeting/compound.html