Install SaltStack on macOS Big Sur

Installing SaltStack on macOS is a pain.

I tried the easy way but failed due to a big problem.

This is the solution

The pain

Homebrew is a pain because they don’t package correctly SaltStack, and finally, we need to find the right way to fix it.

Never install using:

brew install salt

The fix

Salt isn’t compatible with the actual (default) Python from Homebrew.

Install Python

We need Python 3.7, so we install it using the bottled version:

brew install --force-bottle "[email protected]"

Install SaltStack

Finally, we install SaltStack using a fork of the formula which forces “Python 3.7” (the right version):

brew install cdalvaro/tap/salt

We first installed [email protected] with the bottle to avoid a loss of time due to the compilation of Python 3.7.

It’s done, and you’ve finally a functional SaltStack.

Bonus

If you want to obtain clean states, you can be interested in salt-lint: A command-line utility that checks for best practices in Salt…