Create directory

[Vincent Legoll]

Cloud-init has writefiles, but it looks like it does not have the capability to create directories.

how is mixing

runcmd:
 - mkdir /home/toto/bin

and

write_files:
 - content: |
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "Hello world!"

    path: /home/toto/bin/hw.sh
    permissions: '0755'

going to work ?

Is runcmd garanteed to happen before write_files ?
What about a "users" section ?

This is the same kind of problem that is reported here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1486113

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug. In an effort to keep
an up-to-date and valid list of bugs to work on, I have reviewed this
report verifying it still requires effort and occurs on a supported
version of Ubuntu.

Write-files is able to create the path for the file it needs to
create. Consider the following example:

userdata.yaml:
#cloud-config
write_files:
  - path: /root/dir1/dir2/file
    permissions: '0640'
    content: my file
    encoding: file

This should write a file to /root/dir1/dir2/file and will be
required to create the dir1 and dir2 directories.

$ lxc init ubuntu-daily:x x
$ lxc config set x user.user-data - < userdata.yaml
$ lxc start x
# go install tree
$ lxc exec x -- tree
.
└── dir1
    └── dir2
        └── file

The actual code that is run is below, where we check that
the path exists and if not use os.makedirs to generate it:
https://github.com/cloud-init/cloud-init/blob/master/cloudinit/util.py#L1492

I am marking this incomplete as I believe the feature works as expected. If
you disagree please feel free to say otherwise and provide additional
details or scenarios as to why.

[VinceLe (legoll)]

Ok
Which permissions the created directories have ?

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 3 Aug 25 16:24 dir1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 Aug 25 16:24 dir2
-rw-r----- 1 root root 7 Aug 25 16:24 file

Which aligns with my cloud-config:
    permissions: '0640'

[VinceLe (legoll)]

That does look 0755 to me

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

The permissions in the YAML apply to the end file it is creating, not the directories that may or may not need to be created as well.

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/2811