How Salt uses files
There are two ways that Salt's built-in file server uses files when communicating with Minions. They can be served whole and intact, or they can be processed by a templating engine, using a renderer module as discussed in Chapter 5, Rendering Data.
In either case, these files are stored in one or more sets of directories, as configured with the file_roots directive in the master configuration file. These directories are grouped by environment. When Salt is looking for a file, it will search through the directories in the order in which they are listed. The default environment, base, normally uses /srv/salt/ to store files. Such a configuration would look like:
file_roots:
base:
- /srv/salt/What many users don't realize is that the file_roots directive is actually a configuration option that is specific to a file server module called roots. This module, along with all other file server modules, is configured using the fileserver_backend directive:
fileserver_backend...
