Unpacking MessagePack

SALT messages are encoded with a library called msgpack, the Python implementation of MessagePack. How can we read them?

Here’s an example message I want to decode:

† £ j i d ´ 2 0 2 5 0 6 0 2 1 1 4 1 2 6 6 2 1 5 7 8 ¦ r e t u r n £ t c p § r e t c o d e � ¢ i d A B C - L A P T O P - 0 2 £ f u n ª c o n f i g . g e t ¨ f u n _ a r g s ‘ © t r a n s p o r t

We can do that with the same library:

import msgpack

with open('return.p', 'rb') as f:
  unp = msgpack.unpackb(f.read())
  print(unp)

Make sure you install msgpack:

p i p i n s t a l l m s g p a c k

This will print something we can read (newlines added by me):

{
  'jid': '20250602114126621578', 
  'return': 'tcp', 
  'retcode': 0, 
  'id': 'ABC-LAPTOP-02', 
  'fun': 'config.get', 
  'fun_args': ['transport']
}