Salt & Jinja Syntax Highlighting

Syntax highlighting for Salt state/pillar files (.sls) and Jinja templates (.j2, .jinja) in Visual Studio Code.

Features

• Whitespace-control delimiters ({%- ... -%}) are colored evenly on both ends.
• Jinja is highlighted at every YAML nesting level.
• Plain .yml / .yaml files are unaffected.

Highlighting *.yaml.j2 as Salt SLS

If you keep templated YAML in *.yaml.j2 files, map them to the sls language in your project's .vscode/settings.json:

{
  "files.associations": {
    "*.yaml.j2": "sls"
  }
}

Install

From the Marketplace: search for "Salt & Jinja Syntax Highlighting" in the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X), or install from the command line:

code --install-extension MycroftMind.salt-syntax

Then fully quit and reopen VS Code.

Known limitations

• Jinja nested deeply inside YAML block scalars gets best-effort scoping.
• {% raw %} ... {% endraw %} content is not treated as fully literal.
• For non-YAML templates (.conf.j2, env.j2, service.j2), only the Jinja is highlighted; the underlying body (INI/env/systemd) stays plain text.

Building from source

The extension is pure JSON grammars — there's no compile step, only packaging with vsce:

# Requires Node.js 18+
npx --yes @vscode/vsce package   # produces salt-syntax-<version>.vsix
code --install-extension salt-syntax-<version>.vsix

License

MIT © Mycroft Mind, a.s.