Scheduling a state.highstate on all minions with SaltStack schedulers

It was not obvious to me in the docs exactly where to put scheduling “stuff”. I was just looking at the scheduling docs page, so I’m sure some other doc mentioned this. Here’s how to get you started in case you don’t want to read more

nano /srv/pillar/top.sls

base:

‘*’:

– schedule

mkdir /srv/pillar/schedule

nano /srv/pillar/schedule/init.sls

schedule:

highstate:

function: state.highstate

minutes: 60

maxrunning: 1

All that stuff will then result in all your minions running a highstate every 60 minutes. You can obviously filter by changing the ‘*’ to whatever partial minion name you want, just like with salt states.

You can see these schedules in each minion’s pillar data:

salt ‘lbtest*’ pillar.data. For me, it showed up at the bottom of the returned data.

I figure this could or should replace cron jobs, say, for database backups, though I’m not sure if there are any *serious* dangers of the salt minion dying or otherwise failing.