Handling archive files

In infrastructure management, we often face situations when a certain package or tool is not available as a system package, but needs to be fetched and extracted to a certain location in the system to be made available for use. To complete these kinds of tasks, often remote commands are used. However, Salt has a solution to this problem, and you will learn how to handle archive files in this recipe.

How to do it...

1. We will use a new minion called salt-minion in the staging environment. Create a new state directory in the staging environment called tomcat.

2. Create and edit /opt/salt-cookbook/staging/tomcat/package.sls to have the following entries:

   tomcat-server:
     archive:
       - extracted
       - name: /opt/
       - source: http://mirror.nus.edu.sg/apache/tomcat/tomcat- 6/v6.0.43/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.43.tar.gz
       - source_hash: md5=0abbb1852a608c8b4ccb7003c700337b
       - archive_format: tar
       - if_missing: /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.43/

3. Apply this state to the minion by running...