Debugging JINJA in Salt Stack

So I was trying to figure out how to report the template source file within the template itself and I found myself wanting to know what was available in the JINJA globals for a Salt Stack JINJA template.

Turns out you use the show_full_context() function, like this:

Context is: {{ show_full_context() }}

You can parse the output to see what top-level items are available. In my case I found the ‘source’ setting for the JINJA template in use.

Hot tip: if you’re using Vim to inspect the show_full_context() output, try using ‘%’ or ‘]}’ to move between matching braces.

Bonus: while I was learning about reporting the JINJA context I discovered that you can call Salt functions from JINJA templates, like this:

# The following two function calls are equivalent.
{{ salt['cmd.run']('whoami') }}
{{ salt.cmd.run('whoami') }}