Is there a native way to exit state execution? - salt-stack

Question

Here is the scenario. When osarch equals x86 then do something, when it equals aarch64 then do another thing, else quit the state execution. So is there any way like "meta: end_play" in Ansible so that I can put it into {% else %} section to quit when condition is not met?
{% if grains['osarch'] == 'aarch64' %}
plan A:
cmd.run:
- name: echo a
{% elif grains['osarch'] == 'x86' %}
plan B:
cmd.run:
- name: echo b
{% else %}
HOW TO QUIT THE STATE???
{% endif %}

Answer 1

So, the else part is not mandatory. If none of the conditions match, then no action is going to be performed anyway.
From your code:
If osarch matches aarch64, then Plan A is executed.
If osarch matches x86, then Plan B is executed.
If osarch is not either of the above, no action is taken.
So the "graceful" way to stop executing when condition does not match would be:
{% if grains['osarch'] == 'aarch64' %}
plan-A:
cmd.run:
- name: echo a
{% elif grains['osarch'] == 'x86' %}
plan-B:
cmd.run:
- name: echo b
{% endif %}
However, in case you do want to notify the user that you expected the osarch to match something, but it didn't. Then you can use the Saltstack test state module. It has a function called fail_without_changes. We can use this to raise an exception (and fail the run) if none of the conditions match.
Example:
{% if grains['osarch'] == 'aarch64' %}
plan-A:
cmd.run:
- name: echo a
{% elif grains['osarch'] == 'x86' %}
plan-B:
cmd.run:
- name: echo b
{% else %}
fail-the-run:
test.fail_without_changes:
- name: OS arch not matched, bailing out.
- failhard: True
{% endif %}
failhard is required here as the default behaviour in Saltstack is to run all the states. But if we need to halt execution, we need to add this option.
Note that this has more similarity to fail in Ansible than meta: end_play.