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NixOS image cloud init module

#1

Hi,

We are using the NixOS images and we find it great that you provide those images!

One thing we noticed is that you enable the “cloud-init-custom” module in the config and we where wondering how that differs from the “cloud-init” module in NixOS? The reason I am asking is because we are using Nixops to deploy our Switch Engines machines and this makes it hard to enable the “cloud-init-custom” packages as we don’t have the nix source derivations for the cloud-init-custom module.

Or is this custom module just needed because the cloud-init version in NixOS is outdated?

Cheers, Philipp

#2

Hi Philipp

The standard cloud-init module doesn’t work (at least it did not when I tried to use it last year to build an image for SWITCHengines). The cloud-init package itself requires a patch and the version of growpart used by the original module doesn’t work either. My customized module also includes a systemd service that waits for the network to be available before cloud-init is started.

The image uses the standard NixOS channel (which is necessary to be able to use nix-channel --update), so the custom stuff needs to be available in the Nix store and pulled in via /etc/configuration.nix (i.e /nix/store/q9n6x4rwskvy86fs3cxyn2dh0gbscjjl-cloud-init-module and /nix/store/qd8ylyvc8gaahivih6zdqslpdxp7y6vf-cloud-init-patch).

You can find the Nix expression that was used to generate the cloud image here: https://github.com/alexandergall/nixos-cloud-image. In particular, the derivation of the custom cloud-init-module is created by simply copying the module to the store: https://github.com/alexandergall/nixos-cloud-image/blob/master/default.nix#L46.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

–
Alex

#3

Hi Alex

That helps a lot, thank you :slight_smile:
Not sure if all changes/patches should go into NixOS itself, but I assume you don’t mind if I try to get some part into NixOS upstream?

Philipp

#4

Don’t mind at all :slight_smile: It’s been on my to-do list for a long time, but I never got around to doing it properly.

#5

I think the new (17.09) NixOS SWITCHengines images have the standard cloud-init, which now works. Correct?