I began working on the Packer Provisioner for Salt in the middle of 2024 and launched the first version just as my role ended at Broadcom. At the time I had a few roadmap items that I wanted to complete. Guess what? There’s an update!

The original post that I published at the time tells you more about the Provisioner for Salt and provides a high-level overview of Salt. If you’re not familiar with it, I’d suggest starting there.

At the time I mentioned that one of my roadmap items was to provide support for using pillar data. With the latest update (0.5.6 at the time of writing) that is now a reality! Take a look at the plugin documentation on the HashiCorp developer site and you will see the pillar_files, pillar_tree, and pillar_directory options described there.

Installation / update of the plugin is simple, just include the required_plugins stanza in your HCL file:

packer {
  required_plugins {
    salt = {
      version = ">= 0.5.6"
      source = "github.com/mpoore/salt"
    }
  }
}

And use the packer init command to have the latest plugin downloaded.

I know what you’re thinking. “That’s great, but are there any examples?” Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered! My Packer repository has a growing number of examples.

Photo by Kira auf der Heide