Building a serializing renderer

Renderers are reasonably easy to build, because they typically do little more than import a library, shove data through it, and then return the result. Our example renderer will make use of Python's own Pickle format.

The basic structure

Outside of any necessary imports, a renderer requires only a render() function. The most important argument is the first. As with other modules, the name of this argument is not important to Salt, so long as it is defined. Because our example uses the pickle library, we'll use pickle_data as our argument name.

Other arguments are also passed into renderers, but in our case we'll only use them for troubleshooting. In particular, we need to accept saltenv and sls, with the defaults shown later. We'll cover those in the Troubleshooting Renderers section, but for now we'll just use kwargs to cover them.

We also need to start with a special kind of import, called absolute_import, that allows us to import the pickle library from a file...