==============================
Salt Cloud 0.8.4 Release Notes
==============================

Welcome to 0.8.4! Aside from various bug fixes, the most important improvements
in this release are to the deploy scripts. Read on to see what's happened.

Documentation
=============

The documentation for Salt Cloud can be found on Read the Docs:
https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.io

Download
========

Salt Cloud can be downloaded and install via pypi:

https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.4.tar.gz

Some packages have been made available for salt-cloud and more on their
way. Packages for Arch and FreeBSD are being made available thanks to the
work of Christer Edwards, and packages for RHEL and Fedora are being created
by Clint Savage. The Ubuntu PPA is being managed by Sean Channel. Package
availability will be announced on the salt mailing list.

Salt Bootstrap
==============
By far the biggest change to Salt Cloud is the inclusion of the salt-bootstrap
script, made possible by the genius of Alec Koumjian and Pedro Algarvio. From
this point on, each release of Salt Cloud will include the latest stable
version of bootstrap-salt-minion.sh in the deploy folder. This is a generic,
POSIX-compliant deployment script, which autodetects your OS, and installs
the latest version of Salt accordingly. For more information, see:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap

To use this deploy script explicitly, set the script option to
bootstrap-salt-minion in the profile for your VM. For instance:

.. code-block:: yaml

    aws-archlinux:
        provider: aws
        image: ami-0356da6a
        size: Micro Instance
        script: bootstrap-salt-minion
        ssh_username: root

For those of you still using "os" in your profiles, it should be noted that
this option was renamed to "script" in 0.8.2, and your configuration should
be updated accordingly.

Optional Script Option
======================
As mentioned above, usage of the "os" argument has been deprecated in favor of
the "script" argument. However, "script" is now optional. If you do not
specify this option, salt-cloud will default to bootstrap-salt-minion for you.
If you do not want any deployment scripts run, you still have the following
options available to you.

From the command line, use the --no-deploy option:

.. code-block:: bash

    salt-cloud --no-deploy -p myprofile mymachine

In the Salt Cloud configuration, set:

.. code-block:: yaml

    deploy: False

Or in the profile, set the script option to None:

.. code-block:: yaml

    script: None

Other Generic Deploy Scripts
============================
If you want to be assured of always using the latest Salt Bootstrap script,
there are now a few generic templates available in the deploy directory of
your saltcloud source tree:

.. code-block:: bash

    curl-bootstrap
    curl-bootstrap-git
    python-bootstrap
    wget-bootstrap
    wget-bootstrap-git

These are example scripts which were designed to be customized, adapted, and
refit to meet your needs. One important use of them is to pass options to
the salt-bootstrap script, such as updating to specific git tags.