salt: Entry in pillar top.sls with dot in path does not work

And then, this was easier than I expected: 3. Using an ext_pillar, in particular PillarStack, with:

## /etc/salt/master

...
ext_pillar:
  - stack:
    - /srv/pillar/stack.cfg
...

and:

## /srv/pillar/stack.cfg

hosts/{{ minion_id }}.sls

and again eg:

## /srv/pillar/hosts/foo.example.com.sls

foo: bar
baz: whee

This is what I’m leaning toward for my situation; this also has the added benefit of being able to reference these when setting normal other/pillar values (eg with ext_pillar_first: true).

I was wanting to do this today (store host-specific data in fqdn-named files). In case it’s valuable to anyone else coming here from a google search, as I did, I found these two approaches useful:

1. Leveraging @st0ne-dot-at’s post above and going with the aforementioned _ separator:

   ## /srv/pillar/top.sls:
   
   {% set under_id = grains['id'].replace(".","_") %}
   
   base:
     '*':
       - hosts/{{ under_id }}
   

   and eg:

   ## /srv/pillar/hosts/foo_example_com.sls
   
   foo: bar
   baz: whee
   

   Of course, other separators could be used (, = + etc). I tried several and couldn’t find any that substituted well enough for . to go with.

2. Leveraging https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/23910#issuecomment-120371039, with:

   ## /srv/pillar/top.sls:
   
   base:
     '*':
       - fqdn
   

   and:

   ## /srv/pillar/fqdn.sls
   
   {% include "hosts/" + grains['id'] + ".sls" %}
   

   and eg:

   ## /srv/pillar/hosts/foo.example.com.sls
   
   foo: bar
   baz: whee
   

I’m using the following workaround for fqdn specific pillar data:

The node specific file for server www.example.com is: /etc/salt/pillar/servers/com/example/www.sls ( = reversed fqdn )

…

/etc/salt/pillar/top.sls:

base:
  '*':
    - servers

/etc/salt/pillar/servers/init.sls:

{% set rfqdn = '.'.join(grains['fqdn'].lower().split('.')|reverse) %}
include:
  - servers.{{ rfqdn }}

/etc/salt/pillar/servers/com/example/www.sls:

what:
  ever:
    specific:
      data: query