I’ve done a search and there seem to be a large number of issues related to salt-ssh usability with non-root users. I’d like to understand more about the perceived use case from Salt’s perspective and give some feedback.

Perceived use case

salt-ssh seems to be an answer to Ansible and Fabric where the ssh transport from a single laptop is useful for a system administrator to maintain a smaller set of infrastructure. My use case would be running from a virtualenv after pip installing salt-ssh. I would typically create a folder for a set of infrastructure and states. If I was executing the command from this directory I expect salt-ssh to look in this working directory for things like rosters and configuration files. The next place would be a folder ~/.salt-ssh folder in my home directory. I would expect cache directories to be automatically created in that location. The final location would be the system wide settings in /etc/salt.