The basics of grains, pillars, and templates

Grains and pillars provide a means of allowing user-defined variables to be used in conjunction with a minion. Templates can take advantage of those variables to create files on a minion that are specific to that minion.

Before we get into details, let me start off by clarifying a couple of things: grains are defined by the minion which they are specific to, while pillars are defined on the master. Either can be defined statically or dynamically (this book will focus on static), but grains are generally used to provide data that is unlikely to change, at least without restarting the minion, while pillars tend to be more dynamic.

Using grains for minion-specific data

Grains were originally designed to describe ...

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