The Salt Contrib is a destination for modules developed by the community. Since Salt modules are nearly infinite in application not all of the modules developed will be shipped with the main salt application. Salt Contrib will hold modules that can be cleanly added to any of the modular components of Salt. This will also act as a gateway for new module development, generally it will be asked that pull requests for new modules be made against the salt-contrib git repo.

You can symlink your salt-contrib against a development environment and run the tests against it.

All relevant files will be symlinked to the appropriate location in the target environment, so you can modify linked files and test without having to copy files back and forward. Running salt-contrib/link_contrib.py salt -u will remove all links leaving the salt repo clean.

The contrib.tests target runs only the tests from salt-contrib. A travis config is also included which will run the contrib tests if you enable it.

$ git clone git://github.com/saltstack/salt.git
$ git clone git@github.com:<me>/salt-contrib.git

$ salt-contrib/link_contrib.py salt

$ salt/tests/runtests.py -n contrib.tests -v

You can also link against a state folder so the modules are pushed out to clients via _modules, _states etc

$ salt-contrib/link_contrib.py /srv/salt

For grains, simply make a _grains folder in /srv/salt. Then run sync_grains.

$ saltutil.sync_grains