[SOLVED] Issue using Terraform EC2 Userdata

Issue

I am deploying a bunch of EC2 instances that require a mount called /data, this is a seperate disk that I am attaching using volume attach in AWS.

Now when I did the following manually it works fine, so the script I use works however when adding it via userdata I am seeing issues and the mkfs command is not happening.

If you see my terraform config:

resource "aws_instance" "riak" {
  count = 5
  ami = "${var.aws_ami}"
  vpc_security_group_ids = ["${aws_security_group.bastion01_sg.id}","${aws_security_group.riak_sg.id}","${aws_security_group.outbound_access_sg.id}"]
  subnet_id = "${element(module.vpc.database_subnets, 0)}"
  instance_type = "m4.xlarge"
  tags {
    Name = "x_riak_${count.index}"
    Role = "riak"
  }
  root_block_device {
    volume_size = 20
  }
  user_data = "${file("datapartition.sh")}"
}

resource "aws_volume_attachment" "riak_data" {
  count = 5
  device_name = "/dev/sdh"
  volume_id  = "${element(aws_ebs_volume.riak_data.*.id, count.index)}"
  instance_id = "${element(aws_instance.riak.*.id, count.index)}"
}

And then the partition script is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

if [ ! -d /data ];
then mkdir /data
fi

/sbin/mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdh;

while [ -e /dev/xvdh ] ; do sleep 1 ; done

mount /dev/xvdh /data

echo "/dev/xvdh /data ext4 defaults 0 2" >> /etc/fstab

Now when I do this via terraform the mkfs doesn't appear to happen and I see no obvious errors in the syslog. If I copy the script manually and just bash script.sh the mount is created and works as expected.

Has anyone got any suggestions here?

Edit: It's wort noting adding this in AWS gui under userdata also works fine.

Solution

You could try with remote_exec instead of user_data.

User_data relates on cloud-init which can act differently depending on images of your cloud provider.

And also i'm not sure it's a good idea to exec a script that would wait for some time before executing in the cloud-init section => this may lead to VM considering launch has failed because of a timeout (depending on your cloud provider).

Remote_exec may be better here because you will be able to wait until your /dev/xvdh is attached

See here

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  # ...

  provisioner "file" {
    source      = "script.sh"
    destination = "/tmp/script.sh"
  }

  provisioner "remote-exec" {
    inline = [
      "chmod +x /tmp/script.sh",
      "/tmp/script.sh args",
    ]
  }
}

Answered By - jseguillon

Answer Checked By - Katrina (WPSolving Volunteer)