Alpine Linux cloud-init (nocloud)

Alpine-Linux and cloud-init difficulties

I was playing around with Alpine Linux cloud images. Apparently, cloud-init in alpine-linux creates locked user accounts by default.

To get around this, I am using the * password hash (not sure if needed) which should not match any password.

In addition to this, I also have to unlock the account with runcmd which happens after the user is created. This is different to bootcmd which happens earlier.

It is worth noting that neither of these two hacks are needed in Fedora cloud images.

#cloud-config

packages:
  - sudo

users:
  - name: myuser
    passwd: "*"
    primary_group: myuser
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - ssh-rsa YOPUR_SSH_PUBLIC_KEY keycomment
    sudo: "ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL"
    groups: wheel
    shell: /bin/ash

runcmd:
  - passwd -u myuser