cloudinit/Documentation/cloud-config.md

Customize with Cloud-Config

CoreOS allows you to configure networking, create users, launch systemd units on startup and more. We've designed our implementation to allow the same cloud-config file to work across all of our supported platforms.

Only a subset of cloud-config functionality is implemented. A set of custom parameters were added to the cloud-config format that are specific to CoreOS. An example file containing all available options can be found at the bottom of this page.

CoreOS Parameters

coreos.etcd

The coreos.etcd.* options are translated to a partial systemd unit acting as an etcd configuration 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...

#cloud-config

coreos:
    etcd:
        name: node001
	# generate a new token for each unique cluster from https://discovery.etcd.io/new
        discovery: https://discovery.etcd.io/<token>
	# multi-region and multi-cloud deployments need to use $public_ipv4
        addr: $public_ipv4:4001
        peer-addr: $private_ipv4:7001

...will generate a systemd unit drop-in like this:

[Service]
Environment="ETCD_NAME=node001"
Environment="ETCD_DISCOVERY=https://discovery.etcd.io/<token>"
Environment="ETCD_ADDR=203.0.113.29:4001"
Environment="ETCD_PEER_ADDR=192.0.2.13:7001"

For more information about the available configuration options, see the etcd documentation. Note that hyphens in the coreos.etcd.* keys are mapped to underscores.

coreos.oem

These fields are borrowed from the os-release spec and repurposed as a way for coreos-cloudinit to know about the OEM partition on this machine:

• id: Lowercase string identifying the OEM
• name: Human-friendly string representing the OEM
• version-id: Lowercase string identifying the version of the OEM
• home-url: Link to the homepage of the provider or OEM
• bug-report-url: Link to a place to file bug reports about this OEM

coreos-cloudinit renders these fields to /etc/oem-release. If no id field is provided, coreos-cloudinit will ignore this section.

For example, the following cloud-config document...

#cloud-config
coreos:
  oem:
    id: rackspace
    name: Rackspace Cloud Servers
    version-id: 168.0.0
    home-url: https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/
    bug-report-url: https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay

...would be rendered to the following /etc/oem-release:

ID=rackspace
NAME="Rackspace Cloud Servers"
VERSION_ID=168.0.0
HOME_URL="https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay"

coreos.units

Arbitrary systemd units may be provided in the coreos.units attribute. coreos.units is a list of objects with the following fields:

• name: String representing unit's name. Required.
• 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.

Examples

Write a unit to disk, automatically starting it.

#cloud-config

coreos:
    units:
      - name: docker-redis.service
        content: |
          [Unit]
          Description=Redis container
          Author=Me
          After=docker.service

          [Service]
          Restart=always
          ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker start -a redis_server
          ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop -t 2 redis_server
          
          [Install]
          WantedBy=local.target

Start the builtin etcd and fleet services:

# cloud-config

coreos:
    units:
      - name: etcd.service
        command: start
      - name: fleet.service
        command: start

Cloud-Config Parameters

ssh_authorized_keys

Provided public SSH keys will be authorized for the core user.

The keys will be named "coreos-cloudinit" by default. Override this with the --ssh-key-name flag when calling coreos-cloudinit.

#cloud-config

ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC0g+ZTxC7weoIJLUafOgrm+h...

hostname

The provided value will be used to set the system's hostname. This is the local part of a fully-qualified domain name (i.e. foo in foo.example.com).

#cloud-config

hostname: coreos1

users

Add or modify users with the users directive by providing a list of user objects, each consisting of the following fields. Each field is optional and of type string unless otherwise noted. All but the passwd and ssh-authorized-keys fields will be ignored if the user already exists.

• name: Required. Login name of user
• gecos: GECOS comment of user
• passwd: Hash of the password to use for this user
• homedir: User's home directory. Defaults to /home/
• no-create-home: Boolean. Skip home directory creation.
• primary-group: Default group for the user. Defaults to a new group created named after the user.
• groups: Add user to these additional groups
• no-user-group: Boolean. Skip default group creation.
• ssh-authorized-keys: List of public SSH keys to authorize for this user
• coreos-ssh-import-github: Authorize SSH keys from Github user
• coreos-ssh-import-url: Authorize SSH keys imported from a url endpoint.
• system: Create the user as a system user. No home directory will be created.
• no-log-init: Boolean. Skip initialization of lastlog and faillog databases.

The following fields are not yet implemented:

• inactive: Deactivate the user upon creation
• lock-passwd: Boolean. Disable password login for user
• sudo: Entry to add to /etc/sudoers for user. By default, no sudo access is authorized.
• selinux-user: Corresponding SELinux user
• ssh-import-id: Import SSH keys by ID from Launchpad.

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: elroy
    passwd: $6$5s2u6/jR$un0AvWnqilcgaNB3Mkxd5yYv6mTlWfOoCYHZmfi3LDKVltj.E8XNKEcwWm...
    groups:
      - staff
      - docker
    ssh-authorized-keys:
      - ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC0g+ZTxC7weoIJLUafOgrm+h...

Generating a password hash

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:

# On Debian/Ubuntu (via the package "whois")
mkpasswd --method=SHA-512 --rounds=4096

# OpenSSL (note: this will only make md5crypt.  While better than plantext it should not be considered fully secure)
openssl passwd -1

# Python (change password and salt values)
python -c "import crypt, getpass, pwd; print crypt.crypt('password', '\$6\$SALT\$')"

# Perl (change password and salt values)
perl -e 'print crypt("password","\$6\$SALT\$") . "\n"'

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.

Retrieving ssh authorized keys from a GitHub user

Using the field coreos-ssh-import-github you can make coreos-cloudinit to add the public ssh keys from a GitHub user as authorized keys to a server.

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: elroy
    coreos-ssh-import-github: elroy

Retrieving ssh authorized keys from an http endpoint

coreos-cloudinit can also pull public SSH keys from any http endpoint that matches GitHub's API response format. For example, if you have an installation of GitHub Enterprise, you can provide a complete url with an authentication token:

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: elroy
    coreos-ssh-import-url: https://token:<OAUTH-TOKEN>@github-enterprise.example.com/users/elroy/keys

You can also provide any url which response matches that json format for public keys:

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: elroy
    coreos-ssh-import-url: https://example.com/public-keys

write_files

Inject an arbitrary set of files to the local filesystem. Provide a list of objects with the following attributes:

• path: Absolute location on disk where contents should be written
• content: Data to write at the provided path
• permissions: String representing file permissions in octal notation (i.e. '0644')
• 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>.

manage_etc_hosts

Have coreos-cloudinit manage your /etc/hosts file for local name resolution. The only supported value is "localhost" which will cause your system's hostname to resolve to "127.0.0.1". This is helpful when the host does not have DNS infrastructure in place to resolve its own hostname, for example, when using Vagrant.

#cloud-config

manage_etc_hosts: localhost