I have not thoroughly read all of the salt documentation for qubes or salt and i am not sure if this is included somewhere within it, but if you are having trouble with getting your seemingly valid *.top files and you are including jinja templating within said top file, just remove the jinja from your top and all should be well! As of today the qubes default top.sls file in your /srv/salt directory WILL NOT properly parse your jinja syntax because the function which gathers your states from the _tops directory parses it SPECIFICALLY to yaml! This was the cause of a MAJOR headache and I spent at least a day pissed and confused because all I thought to check was the validity of my syntax. The error looks like this: [ERROR ] Unable to render top file: Jinja error: argument of type ‘NoneType’ is not iterable : <----- this is a heavily redacted error message; to be more specific it is only the final line. This is not a design flaw in my opinion because there is little reason to include jinja syntax in your top files.