Troubleshooting returners
As you have seen, there are a number of different pieces of Salt that use different parts of the returner. Some of these require a Master to be running, which makes them a little trickier to troubleshoot. Here are some strategies that can help.
Testing with salt-call
The returner() function can be tested with the salt-call command. When doing this, simple print statements can be used to display information to your console. If there are typos, Python will display error messages. If the problem pertains to technically valid, but still buggy code, then print statements can be used to track down the problem.
Testing with the Master running
The save_load() function requires a job to be generated on the Master, to one or more Minions. This of course requires both a Master and at least one Minion to be running. You can run them in the foreground in separate terminals, in order to see the output from print statements:
# salt-master --log-level debug # salt-minion --log-level...
