Automatic Updates / Frozen Deployments

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# Automatic Updates / Frozen Deployments

New in version 0.10.3.d.

Salt has support for the Esky application freezing and update tool. This tool allows one to build a complete zipfile out of the salt scripts and all their dependencies - including shared objects / DLLs.

## Getting Started

To build frozen applications, you'll need a suitable build environment for each of your platforms. You should probably set up a virtualenv in order to limit the scope of Q/A.

This process does work on Windows. Follow the directions at https://github.com/saltstack/salt-windows-install for details on installing Salt in Windows. Only the 32-bit Python and dependencies have been tested, but they have been tested on 64-bit Windows.

You will need to install `esky` and `bbfreeze` from Pypi in order to enable the `bdist_esky` command in `setup.py`.

## Building and Freezing

Once you have your tools installed and the environment configured, you can then `python setup.py bdist` to get the eggs prepared. After that is done, run `python setup.py bdist_esky` to have Esky traverse the module tree and pack all the scripts up into a redistributable. There will be an appropriately versioned `salt-VERSION.zip` in `dist/` if everything went smoothly.

### Windows

You will need to add `C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\zmq` to your PATH variable. This helps bbfreeze find the zmq dll so it can pack it up.

## Using the Frozen Build

Unpack the zip file in your desired install location. Scripts like `salt-minion` and `salt-call` will be in the root of the zip file. The associated libraries and bootstrapping will be in the directories at the same level. (Check the Esky documentation for more information)

To support updating your minions in the wild, put your builds on a web server that your minions can reach. `salt.modules.saltutil.update()` will trigger an update and (optionally) a restart of the minion service under the new version.

## Gotchas

### My Windows minion isn't responding

The process dispatch on Windows is slower than it is on *nix. You may need to add '-t 15' to your salt calls to give them plenty of time to return.

### Windows and the Visual Studio Redist

You will need to install the Visual C++ 2008 32-bit redistributable on all Windows minions. Esky has an option to pack the library into the zipfile, but OpenSSL does not seem to acknowledge the new location. If you get a `no OPENSSL_Applink` error on the console when trying to start your frozen minion, you have forgotten to install the redistributable.

### Mixed Linux environments and Yum

The Yum Python module doesn't appear to be available on any of the standard Python package mirrors. If you need to support RHEL/CentOS systems, you should build on that platform to support all your Linux nodes. Also remember to build your virtualenv with `--system-site-packages` so that the `yum` module is included.

### Automatic (Python) module discovery

Automatic (Python) module discovery does not work with the late-loaded scheme that Salt uses for (Salt) modules. You will need to explicitly add any misbehaving modules to the `freezer_includes` in Salt's `setup.py`. Always check the zipped application to make sure that the necessary modules were included.

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