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I'm using cloud-init to setup AWS EC2 machines running Ubuntu 14.04. One of the more useful features of cloud-init is the write_files module that allows me to install additional files during the initialization of the virtual machine.

write_files has several useful functions, among them is setting the owner of the file, as documented here. Unfortunately, it appears that I can't use this feature of write_files in Ubuntu 14.04 to set the file owner to any non-system account, because the cloud-init module that adds users - "users groups" is being run after the write_files section. If I set file owner to a user that is added in the users section (or in my case the default users), even if I do this by uid, I get errors such as this:

StandardError:('write-files', OSError("Unknown user or group: 'getpwnam(): name not found: ubuntu'",))

This seems coded into /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg, which has this section:

cloud_init_modules:
 - migrator
 - seed_random
 - bootcmd
 - write-files
 - growpart
 - resizefs
 - set_hostname
 - update_hostname
 - update_etc_hosts
 - ca-certs
 - rsyslog
 - users-groups
 - ssh

I've seen a few examples on the internet that set cloud_init_modules in the cloud-init user data, but if I add such a section and order it so write-files is under users-groups, it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Aside from giving up on write_files and implementing a runcmd based workaround as documented in question #605670 is there anything else that can be done?

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I hit the same bug #1231541. As I had the problem in OpenStack, I used packer to rebuild the image and change the order of the cloud-init modules. Afterwards everything worked as expected.

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    Updating images by hand is always an option, and always a bad option :-) I prefer to work directly with upstream whenever possible
    – Guss
    Nov 28, 2016 at 17:41

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