Creating a Salt state that will be executed upon minion connection

Question

I unable to find in the documentation an example of the following use case:

Minions, all of them or only a specific group - will apply some state on their own
upon system startup or restored connection..
Can I create a task in Salt that I do not need to manually apply with state.apply ?

I want to manage Windows boxes (not VMs) -
so not all of them are online at the time that I decide to apply some state..

---

Answer 1

To apply states on system/service restart you can set startup_states in the minion config:

startup_states: highstate

startup_states: sls
sls_list:
  - minion_startup

Alternatively, you can schedule a job to run every N seconds after the minion starts, which includes at startup by default:

schedule:
  highstate:
    function: state.apply
    seconds: 3600

If that's not what you mean by "restored connection", then you probably want to look at presence events and writing a reactor:

presence_events: true
reactor:
  - salt/presence/change:
    - salt://reactor/presence.sls

{% for minion in data["new"] %}
reconnect state:
  local.state.apply:
    - tgt: "{{ minion }}"
    - arg:
      - minion_startup
{% endif %}