cloud-localds option to add SSH public key

[Michael Vorburger]

I've written a script which creates a cloud-init seed ISO using the current user's pubkey as user-data.

It's currently at https://github.com/archlinux/archiso/compare/master...vorburger:create_cloud-init.sh, and an (evolution of it) should land in Arch Linux sooner or later, watch https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archiso/-/merge_requests/117.

But perhaps this is something that cloud-localds could natively support out of the box already?

What if one could just use it WITHOUT having to hand write a user-data file, and it would generate it, given a public key (perhaps with options to choose which one, by ID or file name; as suggested in the ongoing review discussion of the Arch MR)?

Would a PR contribution proposing to add an option for this potentially be welcome in this project?

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

it seems like a fine idea, implementation details aside.

things to think about:
 * it would be backwards incompatible to change the meaning of the arguments (user-data [meta-data]).
 * if you add something like --ssh-keys=, then is that incompatible with providing user-data, or do you read and edit the provided user-data to insert the keys. what if there are already keys there? append, overwrite ...

its a fine idea, you just have to work out things like that.

I'd suggest that one thing you'd want to do is allow input into ssh-import-id, so that i could have it use my github or launchpad keys magically. I think its probably best in that path to retrieve the keys "client side" rather than using cloud-init's 'ssh_import_id' support.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

Hi Michael,

+1 on Scott's comment. Please note that while issues are tracked here on Launchpad cloud-utils' development happens on GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/canonical/cloud-utils/

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

Bug migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/canonical/cloud-utils/issues/41