How to merge profiles' user.vendor-data?

LXD
22

user.meta-data doesn’t get merged, it’s a different much more limited format that pretty much just tells cloud-init what the instance name and id is. In the new world, meta-data cannot be altered by the user anymore (that’s why it doesn’t have a cloud-init.meta-data equivalent).

23

Added to Linux Containers - LXD - Has been moved to Canonical

25

Any news? How to apply cloud-init.user-data consistently from many profiles or may be to merge they today?

26

There hasn’t been a change to this.

You can have at most two Incus profiles with cloud-init instructions.
One profile would list those instructions in a user.user-data and the other profile in a user.vendor-data section. Then, by specifying both these two profiles when launching an instance, you would get these cloud-init instructions merged together.

The command line could look like the following.

incus launch images:debian/12/cloud --profile default --profile addwebserver --profile adddatabaseserver
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27

I tested it and for me don’t work (( what am I doing wrong?

I created two profiles:

incus profile create vendor
incus profile create user

and created content of these profiles:

incus profile set vendor cloud-init.vendor-data - << EOF
#cloud-config
runcmd:
  - echo DISPLAY="$DISPLAY" >> /etc/environment
  - echo WAYLAND_DISPLAY="$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" >> /etc/environment
write_files:
  - path: /home/ubuntu/vendor-content.txt
    permissions: 0755
    content: |
      vendor content
EOF

incus profile set user cloud-init.user-data - << EOF
#cloud-config
write_files:
  - path: /home/ubuntu/user-content.txt
    permissions: 0755
    content: |
      user content
runcmd:
  - echo XDG_SESSION_TYPE="wayland" >> /etc/environment
  - echo QT_QPA_PLATFORM="wayland" >> /etc/environment
EOF

Then launched the container:

incus create ubuntu2310cloud websurf --profile=vendor --profile=user
incus start websurf

After finished cloud-init:

incus exec websurf -- su -l ubuntu -c 'cloud-init analyze show'

I got configuration only last profile (user). Why? Env variables created only from user profile:

incus exec websurf -- su -l ubuntu -c 'cat /etc/environment'

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin"
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland

and only one file created in home directory. The file vendor-content.txt is missed:

incus exec websurf -- su -l ubuntu -c 'ls -l $HOME'

total 4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Apr  3 10:54 user-content.txt
28

Have a look in the container in the directory /var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net/.

The files are in there, verbatim, just as they came from the Incus profile.

debian@mycloud:/var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  46 Apr  3 11:33 meta-data
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107 Apr  3 11:33 network-config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 230 Apr  3 11:33 user-data
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 213 Apr  3 11:33 vendor-data
debian@mycloud:/var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net$

This means that now cloud-init took over, has the proper user-data and vendor-data files and can do its magic. It’s off the hands of Incus.

I tried your instructions. It looks like cloud-init might perform some merging of its own. Because it runs part of the user-data and part of the vendor-data.

29

I didn’t understand. Is it now impossible to merge cloud-init.vendor-data and cloud-init.user-data? It now don’t work?

30

Incus does what is required so that the cloud-init.vendor-data and cloud-init.user-data are placed in the container at the proper location ( /var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net) for cloud-init to do its magic.
I do not have deep knowledge of cloud-init; you would need to check the logs or perhaps enable more detailed logs to figure out what’s going on.

Your example files are mostly fine. I wouldn’t put my test files in /home/ubuntu/ because I am not sure in what sequence the non-root account is created. There’s a possibility that /home/ubuntu has not been created yet.

31

Ok, thanks! But env variables to /etc/environment also don’t sets from my cloud-init.vendor-data, so I think it’s not a matter of ubuntu user that hasn’t been created yet. I will look at the logs of cloud-init

32

The incus documentation says:

If both vendor-data and user-data are supplied for an instance, cloud-init merges the two configurations. However, if you use the same keys in both configurations, merging might not be possible. In this case, configure how cloud-init should merge the provided data. See Merging user data sections for instructions.

Both your configs are providing “runcmd” and “write_files”, so if you don’t want one to overwrite the other, you need to tell cloud-init how to merge them, as per this example.

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