I still have some other SmartOS related blog posts in the pipeline, but this one is quick and I know there's at least one person who will use these instructions soon. I recently ironed out the details for a build environment for esky builds of salt 2014.7 release candidates.

2014.1.0 has been released [http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/releases/2014.1.0.html] I've built an esky package for it. Get it here [https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/nahamu/public/salt/salt-2014.1.0-esky-smartos.tar.gz] . Known issue with 2014.1.0 SMF support is a little

(Edited May 1, 2015 with updated links to tarballs. Also, in hindsight I don't think that using a user-script is the best way to bootstrap for production. This is still a quick way to kick the tires, though.) Create a Master Provision a zone /opt/local/sdc/bin/sdc-createmachine \ --package

This isn't for everyone. Some people like their package manager to install their configuration management tool. Others like to use things like the omnibus install of chef. This is like the latter. This process will hopefully be much better when the successors of bbfreeze-1.1.2 and salt-0.17.1