Simplistic example for installing a software using master REST API for SaltStack

I am new to salt stack and trying my hands with it. I am trying to install a simplistic app say nginx on my minions using rest api.

I am able to ping my minions using following API call.

POST on https://x.x.x.x:8080 using following payload:

{
    "client" : "local",
    "tgt" : "*", 
    "fun" : "test.ping" 
}

On the similar line, I am looking for how to install a software on all of my minions. I couldn't find clear step in the documentation I looked at. Could someone help with this please ?

Thanks

Solution

I believe you are looking for something like this:

{
    "client" : "local",
    "tgt" : "*", 
    "fun" : "pkg.install",
    "arg" : ["nginx"]
}

Reference:

pkg execution module, which is a virtual module that gets translated into the proper, OS-specific package manager: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.pkg.html
- Note that you can instead use a target execution module instead that is specific to your OS, such as aptpkg for debian-based systems using apt
rest_cherrypy API documentation: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/netapi/all/salt.netapi.rest_cherrypy.html
- Usage section, including more detailed examples: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/netapi/all/salt.netapi.rest_cherrypy.html#usage
For more details on local client: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/clients/#salt.client.LocalClient

SaltStack also has an open source CLI tool for targeting the Salt API, called pepper, that you may find useful:

PyPi / pip package: https://pypi.org/project/salt-pepper/
- Source: https://github.com/saltstack/pepper

Also, here are some great resources to those new to SaltStack that may also be helpful for others. They are great places to ask questions, learn new content, hear directly from maintainers and other users, etc.