salt-minion

Start the Salt minion daemon in the foreground

$ salt-minion

$ salt-minion -d

$ salt-minion -c [/etc/salt]

$ salt-minion -l debug

$ salt-minion --disable-keepalive

salt-minion [options]

salt-minion is the agent daemon that runs on managed systems in a SaltStack infrastructure. It connects to a Salt master, receives commands, executes them locally, and returns results.
On startup, the minion generates a key pair and sends its public key to the master for acceptance. Once accepted, the minion subscribes to the master's ZeroMQ publish socket to receive commands. Configuration is stored in /etc/salt/minion or the /etc/salt/minion.d/ directory.
The minion can also run in masterless mode using salt-call --local, enabling local configuration management without a master. Setting master_type: disable allows running beacons and engines without master connectivity.

-d, --daemon

Run the Salt minion as a daemon in the background

Specify the configuration directory (default: /etc/salt)

Console log level: info, warning, error, debug, trace, garbage, none

Specify the log file path (default: /var/log/salt/minion)

Log file logging level

Specify the location of the pidfile (default: /var/run/salt-minion.pid)

Specify user to run salt-minion

Disable automatic restart mechanism; run daemon directly

Print help message and exit

Print version information

/etc/salt/minion

Main minion configuration file defining the master address, minion ID, grains, and module settings.

Directory for additional configuration files merged with the main config, applied alphabetically.

Default minion log file location.

The minion key must be accepted on the master before commands can be executed. By default, the daemon runs with an automatic restart wrapper; use --disable-keepalive when managed by systemd or container runtimes. Configuration in minion.d/ is applied alphabetically, so duplicate settings may override unexpectedly.

salt-minion is part of SaltStack, created by Thomas Hatch in 2011. The minion agent enables Salt's remote execution and configuration management capabilities across infrastructure at scale.

salt(1), salt-master(8), salt-key(1), salt-call(1)