Saltstack & ChatOps with Slack, Hubot and StackStorm - Vagrant demo

Part of tutorial: Getting Started With StackStorm and SaltStack

Introduction

This is quick demonstration of the StackStorm event-driven automation platform running with Saltstack configuration management tool and Hubot ChatOps engine. The objective is to operate servers with Ansible directly from Slack chat.

It will get you up and running with chatops control VM with all St2 components prepared as well as Salt and Hubot configured. Additionally, it installs 3 Ubuntu VMs: saltmaster, web server with nginx and db server with mysql.

As a result you should get 100% ready environment allowing you to execute Salt commands module and run Salt states against VMs directly from your Slack chat. In this showcase we already crafted some simple, but useful real world ChatOps commands.

Getting started

1. Prepare Slack

• Create slack.com account if you don't have it yet.
• Navigate Configure Integrations -> Filter -> Hubot and generate Slack & Hubot API Token.

2. Go to your favorite OS family and call vagrant up

Go to your favorite OS family, edit Vagrantfile and add the just generated API token under HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN constant, or just export it:

export HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN=xoxb-1234-5678-91011-00e4dd

To provision the environment run:

vagrant up

Installation takes some time (st2 engine comes with Python, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenStack Mistral).

3. Try ChatOps

You should see your bot online in Slack and now you're ready to type some chat commands. Don't forget to invite your bot into the Slack channel: /invite <your-bot-name>. Your first ChatOps command is:

!help

Additionally check the results of performed commands in StackStorm control panel:
https://www.chatops/ username: testu password: testp

4. Don't stop!

Try it, explore the internals. For configuration see: saltmaster.sh, salt.sh, and chatops.sh which are usual Vagrant shell provisioner scripts. Integrate your custom workflows and deployment mechanisms, you'll see how your work becomes more efficient during time.

Feel the power of control center and may the force will be with you!

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Stackstorm always ready to help, feel free to:

• ask questions on IRC: #stackStorm on freenode.net or stackstorm public Slack
• report bug, provide feature request or just give us a ✮ star at GitHub st2
• share your st2 story, email us