VyOS cloud-init

Cloud and virtualized instances of VyOS are initialized using the industry-standard cloud-init. Via cloud-init, the system performs tasks such as injecting SSH keys and configuring the network. In addition, the user can supply a custom configuration at the time of instance launch.

Config Sources

VyOS support three types of config sources.

  • Metadata - Metadata is sourced by the cloud platform or hypervisor. In some clouds, there is implemented as an HTTP endpoint at http://169.254.169.254.

  • Network configuration - This config source informs the system about the network settings like IP addresses, routes, DNS. Available only in several cloud and virtualization platforms.

  • User-data - User-data is specified by the user. This config source offers the ability to insert any CLI configuration commands into the configuration before the first boot.

User-data

Major cloud providers offer a means of providing user-data at the time of instance launch. It can be provided as plain text or as base64-encoded text, depending on cloud provider. Also, it can be compressed using gzip, which makes sense with a long configuration commands list, because of the hard limit to ~16384 bytes for the whole user-data.

The easiest way to configure the system via user-data is the Cloud-config syntax described below.

Cloud-config modules

In VyOS, by default, enabled three modules:

  • write_files - this module allows to insert any files into the filesystem before the first boot, for example, pre-generated encryption keys, certificates, or even a whole config.boot file.

  • vyos_userdata - the module accepts a list of CLI configuration commands in a vyos_config_commands section, which gives an easy way to configure the system during deployment.

  • vyos_install - this module allows to install VyOS without human intervention.

cloud-config file format

A cloud-config document is written in YAML. The file must begin with #cloud-config line.

Module vyos_userdata

The key used to designate a VyOS configuration is vyos_config_commands. What follows is VyOS configuration using the “set-style” syntax. Both “set” and “delete” commands are supported.

Commands requirements:

  • one command per line

  • if command ends in a value, it must be inside single quotes

  • a single-quote symbol is not allowed inside command or value

The commands list produced by the show configuration commands command on a VyOS router should comply with all the requirements, so it is easy to get a proper commands list by copying it from another router.

The configuration specified in the cloud-config document overwrites default configuration values and values configured via Metadata.

Here is an example cloud-config.

#cloud-config
vyos_config_commands:
  - set system host-name 'vyos-prod-ashburn'
  - set system ntp server 1.pool.ntp.org
  - set system ntp server 2.pool.ntp.org
  - delete interfaces ethernet eth1 address 'dhcp'
  - set interfaces ethernet eth1 address '192.0.2.247/24'
  - set protocols static route 198.51.100.0/24 next-hop '192.0.2.1'

Module vyos_install

This module allows to install VyOS without human intervention. It will be useful for the installation via a network like PXE or USB flash install. After network boot or USB drive boot, this module runs automatic system installation with predefined grub parameters. The next possible option can be used.

#cloud-config
vyos_install:
  activated: true # true - enable installer, false - disable. Default: false
  post_reboot: true # true - reboot after installation, false - do not reboot. Default: false
  ci_disable: true # true - disable cloud-init after installation, false - do not disable. Default: false
  boot_params:
    console_type: serial # type of console: kvm, serial. Default: kvm
    serial_console_num: 1 # serial console number. Default: 0
    serial_console_speed: 115200 # serial console speed. Default: 9600
    cmdline_extra: nosmt mitigations=off # add extra parameters for kernel cmdline

System Defaults/Fallbacks

These are the VyOS defaults and fallbacks.

  • SSH is configured on port 22

  • vyos/vyos credentials if no others specified by data source

  • DHCP on first Ethernet interface if no network configuration is provided

All of these can be overridden using the configuration in user-data.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter problems, verify that the cloud-config document contains valid YAML. Online resources such as https://www.yamllint.com/ provide a simple tool for validating YAML.

cloud-init logs to /var/log/cloud-init.log. This file can be helpful in determining why the configuration varies from what you expect. You can fetch the most important data filtering output for vyos keyword:

sudo grep vyos /var/log/cloud-init.log