saltstack 'Pillar failed to render with the following messages'

Question

I'm getting the following error message when I do a state.apply:

[ERROR   ] Data passed to highstate outputter is not a
valid highstate return: {'sonia9': ['Pillar failed to
render with the following messages:', "Rendering SLS 'users'
failed. Please see master log for details."]}

Is it possible to see the actually rendering and where it failed?

I've already tried:

• log_level: garbage in /etc/salt/master, restarted daemon
• salt-call -l debug state.apply on the minion

I get the same unhelpful error message, and no more detail about the actual rendering.

Answer 1

Sometimes it can happen that minion has stale cache. I have experience with the frustration when salt is reporting that something failed to render but that "something" is no longer listed in the top.sls files and saltmaster log doesn't say anything at all.

What can help in this case is to refresh grains on the affected minion (also refreshes pillars by default):

salt <target_host_pattern> saltutil.refresh_grains

Answer 2

I have found that if your pillar has duplicates In my case the same package was listed in the yaml twice. (long List) it would fail to complile but give no reason.. so to shorten the answer you may have to just clean your pillar and 1980's debug the file