heist 6.3.1

Heist Manager

In order to run Heist you will need to specify a Heist manager. An example of a heist manager is salt.minion but this will require a user to install the heist-salt project:

pip install heist-salt

Making Your Roster

A Roster is a file used by Heist to map login information to the systems in your environment. This file can be very simple and just needs to tell Heist where your systems are and how to log into them via ssh. Open a file called roster.cfg and add the data needed to connect to a remote system via ssh:

system_name:
  host: 192.168.4.4
  username: fred
  password: freds_password

The roster files typically all live inside of a roster directory. But to get started we will execute a single roster file with Heist using the salt.minion Heist manager:

heist salt.minion -R roster.cfg

Assuming your roster is correct, heist will now connect to the remote system and deploy the salt.minion binary.

Tear Down

Heist is able to automatically clean up as well! Just soft kill your heist application and it will reach out to all connections, tell them to remove the deployed artifacts from the target systems and stop the service! Like a proper heist these should be no evidence left behind!

Using Heist to Deploy Salt Minions

If you want to use Heist to deploy and manage Salt, you will need to install heist-salt.

Additional Documentation

If you want to read more about how to use Heist and its internals please take a look at Heist’s documentation here: https://heist.readthedocs.io/en/latest/