One of things I like in SaltStack is his modules system. It's as simple as Ansible modules.
All what you need is creating a module with Python (or Cython) and place it inside "_modules" directory at the root of the Salt fileserver path.
For example I needed to extend "replace" function in Jinja which doesn't support Regex (also I added "match" with Regex too). But instead creating a Jinja custom filter, I did create a simple SaltStack module to do that.
This simple module is just using default Python Regex module to achieve that goal.
For example, let's give this module a name "regex.py":
vim salt/_modules/regex.py
It will have:
import re
def replace(pattern, replace, string):
return re.sub(pattern, replace, string)
def match(pattern, string):
return re.match(pattern, string)
Don't forget to sync the new module:
salt * saltutil.sync_modules
Once you did, you can use it inside Jinja or SLS files (this is just an arbitrary example):
{% set foo = "xyz123" %}
{%- if salt[regex.match]('\d+', foo) -%}{#- This will return True -#}
{{ salt[regex.replace](r"\d+(\d)","\g<1>", foo) }}
{%- endif -%}
Just remember, modules will work on client side (minion), so you need to take care of comparability.
This was a quick intro to SaltStack modules, Salt has a lot of capabilities for modules like cross calling execution and so on ... you can find more details on SaltStack documentation: Writing Execution Modules.
