# Salt Rosters

Salt rosters are plugable systems added in Salt 0.17.0 to facilitate the `salt-ssh` system. The roster system was created because `salt-ssh` needs a means to identify which systems need to be targeted for execution.

Note

The Roster System is not needed or used in standard Salt because the master does not need to be initially aware of target systems, since the Salt Minion checks itself into the master.

Since the roster system is pluggable, it can be easily augmented to attach to any existing systems to gather information about what servers are presently available and should be attached to by `salt-ssh`. By default the roster file is located at /etc/salt/roster.

## How Rosters Work

The roster system compiles a data structure internally refered to as targets. The targets is a list of target systems and attributes about how to connect to said systems. The only requirement for a roster module in Salt is to return the targets data structure.

### Targets Data

The information which can be stored in a roster target is the following:

    <Salt ID>:   # The id to reference the target system with
        host:    # The IP address or DNS name of the remote host
        user:    # The user to log in as
        passwd:  # The password to log in with

        # Optional parameters
        port:    # The target system's ssh port number
        sudo:    # Boolean to run command via sudo
        priv:    # File path to ssh private key, defaults to salt-ssh.rsa
        timeout: # Number of seconds to wait for response

Current Salt release: 0.17.1

### Table Of Contents

- Salt Rosters
  - How Rosters Work
    - Targets Data

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