Install the Salt Master Plugin on air-gapped systems

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• You are trying to install and configure Salt without access to public third-party package repositories.

Environment

VMware Aria Automation Config 8.x

Cause

Air-gapped systems, by design, do not have access to public third-party repositories. Module management and system updates for air-gapped systems is typically controlled by policies set up by the customer. This usually means hosting package repositories on the company's internal secure network.

Resolution

See the Workaround below for additional information.

Workaround:
Installation of Python modules (third-party dependencies) on air-gapped systems with specific example of capturing dependencies for the VMware Aria Automation Config Master plugin:

Capture Python modules for air-gapped install

• From a machine with internet access that is an identical version to the machine which will be targeted for the module install, perform the below steps.

Prerequisites

• python3 installed

Procedure

1. Create empty virtual env:

   python3 -m venv test
   cd test
   source bin/activate

2. Install the required modules that are required into the virtual environment.

Note: This step can be generalized to gather any additional modules that may be required for any other use case. The specific modules used in this are dependencies of the VMware Aria Automation Config Master plugin.

bin/pip3 install pyjwt==2.4.0 pika==1.3.1 3

3. Gather all modules that were installed (will include dependencies now):

   bin/pip3 freeze > /tmp/requirements.txt

4. Download all of the modules wheel files:

   mkdir /tmp/wheel
   bin/pip3 download -r /tmp/requirements.txt -d /tmp/wheel

5. Check the contents of the tmp directory that contains the dependencies

   ls /tmp/wheel
   pika-1.3.1-py3-none-any.whl PyJWT-2.4.0-py3-none-any.whl

6. Prepare the shippable file:

   mv /tmp/requirements.txt /tmp/wheel tar -zcf wheelhouse.tar.gz /tmp/wheel

7. Transfer the file to the air-gapped system.
8. Install Module(s) on the air-gapped system(s):

   tar -zxf wheelhouse.tar.gz
   pip3 install -r tmp/wheel/requirements.txt --no-index --find-links tmp/wheel

Note: You may need to consider the "downgrade" scenario if the module already installed is at a higher version than is incompatible.