Running the Salt Master as Unprivileged User

While the default setup runs the Salt Master as the root user, it is generally wise to run servers as an unprivileged user. In Salt 0.9.10 the management of the running user was greatly improved, the only change needed is to alter the option user in the master configuration file and all salt system components will be updated to function under the new user when the master is started.

If running a version older that 0.9.10 then a number of files need to be owned by the user intended to run the master:

# chown -R <user> /var/cache/salt
# chown -R <user> /var/log/salt
# chown -R <user> /etc/salt/pki