title: How do I manage minion roles with salt-stack pillars?
body: <p>I'm trying to understand how to use Salt with roles like Chef can be used, but I have some holes in my understanding that reading lots of docs has failed to fill at this point.</p>
  
  <p>The principle issue is that I'm trying to manage roles with Salt, like Chef does, but I don't know how to appropriately set the pillar value. What I want to do is assign, either by script or by hand, a role to a vagrant box and then have the machine install the appropriate files on it.</p>
  
  <p>What I don't understand is how I can set something that will tell salt-master what to install on the box given the particular role I want it to be. I tried setting a </p>
  
  <pre><code>salt.pillar('site' =&gt; 'my_site1') 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in the Vagrantfile and then checking it in the salt state <code>top.sls</code> file with</p>
  
  <pre><code>{{ pillar.get('site') == 'my_site1'
    -&lt;do some stuff&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this doesn't work. What's the correct way to do this?</p>