4.1 The Flexibility Problem

One major difficulties people face when learning Salt is there are often several ways to achieve the same thing. Worse, the Salt documentation and many other courses use these different forms interchangeably. In this course we will use one consistent form and refer the interested reader to alternate forms which I document in the appendices.

One common issue is the multiple ways to write common state stanzas. The following all achieve the same basic outcome (the tool git is installed).

1git: 
2  pkg.installed: []
1install-git: 
2  pkg.installed: 
3    pkgs: 
4      - git
1install-git: 
2  pkg.installed: 
3    - name: git