CoreOS allows you to declaratively customize various OS-level items, such as network configuration, user accounts, and systemd units. This document describes the full list of items we can configure. The `coreos-cloudinit` program uses these files as it configures the OS after startup or during runtime.
The file used by this system initialization program is called a "cloud-config" file. It is inspired by the [cloud-init][cloud-init] project's [cloud-config][cloud-config] file. which is "the defacto multi-distribution package that handles early initialization of a cloud instance" ([cloud-init docs][cloud-init-docs]). Because the cloud-init project includes tools which aren't used by CoreOS, only the relevant subset of its configuration items will be implemented in our cloud-config file. In addition to those, we added a few CoreOS-specific items, such as etcd configuration, OEM definition, and systemd units.
CoreOS tries to conform to each platform's native method to provide user data. Each cloud provider tends to be unique, but this complexity has been abstracted by CoreOS. You can view each platform's instructions on their documentation pages. The most universal way to provide cloud-config is [via config-drive](https://github.com/coreos/coreos-cloudinit/blob/master/Documentation/config-drive.md), which attaches a read-only device to the machine, that contains your cloud-config file.
We can use the templating feature of coreos-cloudinit to automate etcd configuration with the `$private_ipv4` and `$public_ipv4` fields. For example, the following cloud-config document...
The `coreos.update.*` parameters manipulate settings related to how CoreOS instances are updated.
- **reboot-strategy**: One of "reboot", "etcd-lock", "best-effort" or "off" for controlling when reboots are issued after an update is performed.
- _reboot_: Reboot immediately after an update is applied.
- _etcd-lock_: Reboot after first taking a distributed lock in etcd, this guarantees that only one host will reboot concurrently and that the cluster will remain available during the update.
- _best-effort_ - If etcd is running, "etcd-lock", otherwise simply "reboot".
- _off_ - Disable rebooting after updates are applied (not recommended).
The `coreos.oem.*` parameters follow the [os-release spec][os-release], but have been repurposed as a way for coreos-cloudinit to know about the OEM partition on this machine:
- **runtime**: Boolean indicating whether or not to persist the unit across reboots. This is analagous to the `--runtime` argument to `systemd enable`. Default value is false.
- **enable**: Boolean indicating whether or not to handle the [Install] section of the unit file. This is similar to running `systemctl enable <name>`. Default value is false.
- **content**: Plaintext string representing entire unit file. If no value is provided, the unit is assumed to exist already.
- **command**: Command to execute on unit: start, stop, reload, restart, try-restart, reload-or-restart, reload-or-try-restart. Default value is restart.
**NOTE:** The command field is ignored for all network, netdev, and link units. The systemd-networkd.service unit will be restarted in their place.
The `users` parameter adds or modifies the specified list of users. Each user is an object which consists of the following fields. Each field is optional and of type string unless otherwise noted.
If you choose to use a password instead of an SSH key, generating a safe hash is extremely important to the security of your system. Simplified hashes like md5crypt are trivial to crack on modern GPU hardware. Here are a few ways to generate secure hashes:
Using a higher number of rounds will help create more secure passwords, but given enough time, password hashes can be reversed. On most RPM based distributions there is a tool called mkpasswd available in the `expect` package, but this does not handle "rounds" nor advanced hashing algorithms.
We can also pull public SSH keys from any HTTP endpoint which matches [GitHub's API response format](https://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/#list-public-keys-for-a-user).
For example, if you have an installation of GitHub Enterprise, you can provide a complete URL with an authentication token:
The `write-file` parameter defines a list of files to create on the local filesystem. Each file is represented as an associative array which has the following keys:
- **owner**: User and group that should own the file written to disk. This is equivalent to the `<user>:<group>` argument to `chown <user>:<group> <path>`.
