These release notes are for an old release of Salt. This release might contain known security and other issues that are fixed in the latest release.

# Salt 0.11.0 Release Notes

release:

  2012-12-14

Salt 0.11.0 is here, with some highly sought after and exciting features. These features include the new overstate system, the reactor system, a new state run scope component called __context__, the beginning of the search system (still needs a great deal of work), multiple package states, the MySQL returner and a better system to arbitrarily reference outputters.

It is also noteworthy that we are changing how we mark release numbers. For the life of the project we have been pushing every release with features and fixes as point releases. We will now be releasing point releases for only bug fixes on a more regular basis and major feature releases on a slightly less regular basis. This means that the next release will be a bugfix only release with a version number of 0.11.1. The next feature release will be named 0.12.0 and will mark the end of life for the 0.11 series.

## Major Features

### OverState

The overstate system is a simple way to manage rolling state executions across many minions. The overstate allows for a state to depend on the successful completion of another state.

### Reactor System

The new reactor system allows for a reactive logic engine to be created which can respond to events within a salted environment. The reactor system uses sls files to match events fired on the master with actions, enabling Salt to react to problems in an infrastructure.

Your load-balanced group of webservers is under extra load? Spin up a new VM and add it to the group. Your fileserver is filling up? Send a notification to your sysadmin on call. The possibilities are endless!

### Module Context

A new component has been added to the module loader system. The module context is a data structure that can hold objects for a given scope within the module.

This allows for components that are initialized to be stored in a persistent context which can greatly speed up ongoing connections. Right now the best example can be found in the cp execution module.

### Multiple Package Management

A long desired feature has been added to package management. By definition Salt States have always installed packages one at a time. On most platforms this is not the fastest way to install packages. Erik Johnson, aka terminalmage, has modified the package modules for many providers and added new capabilities to install groups of packages. These package groups can be defined as a list of packages available in repository servers:

    python_pkgs:
      pkg.installed:
        - pkgs:
          - python-mako
          - whoosh
          - python-git

or specify based on the location of specific packages:

    python_pkgs:
      pkg.installed:
        - sources:
          - python-mako: http://some-rpms.org/python-mako.rpm
          - whoosh: salt://whoosh/whoosh.rpm
          - python-git: ftp://companyserver.net/python-git.rpm

### Search System

The bones to the search system have been added. This is a very basic interface that allows for search backends to be added as search modules. The first supported search module is the whoosh search backend. Right now only the basic paths for the search system are in place, making this very experimental. Further development will involve improving the search routines and index routines for whoosh and other search backends.

The search system has been made to allow for searching through all of the state and pillar files, configuration files and all return data from minion executions.

## Notable Changes

All previous versions of Salt have shared many directories between the master and minion. The default locations for keys, cached data and sockets has been shared by master and minion. This has created serious problems with running a master and a minion on the same systems. 0.11.0 changes the defaults to be separate directories. Salt will also attempt to migrate all of the old key data into the correct new directories, but if it is not successful it may need to be done manually. If your keys exhibit issues after updating make sure that they have been moved from `/etc/salt/pki` to `/etc/salt/pki/{master,minion}`.

The old setup will look like this:

    /etc/salt/pki
    |-- master.pem
    |-- master.pub
    |-- minions
    |   `-- ragnarok.saltstack.net
    |-- minions_pre
    |-- minion.pem
    |-- minion.pub
    |-- minion_master.pub
    |-- minions_pre
    `-- minions_rejected

With the accepted minion keys in `/etc/salt/pki/minions`, the new setup places the accepted minion keys in `/etc/salt/pki/master/minions`.

    /etc/salt/pki
    |-- master
    |   |-- master.pem
    |   |-- master.pub
    |   |-- minions
    |   |   `-- ragnarok.saltstack.net
    |   |-- minions_pre
    |   `-- minions_rejected
    |-- minion
    |   |-- minion.pem
    |   |-- minion.pub
    |   `-- minion_master.pub