AWS CloudFormation Userdata

Question

I have a shell script of about 200 lines. I want to use it to bootstrap an ec2 instance. Is there any tool available for converting shell script into userdata?

Is there a reason why you wouldn't just copy the script file to file and execute with cloud formation? — Edwin
I'm a newbie to cloudformation. If you're talking about "wget" a shell script from s3 bucket and executing it after changing the permissions, Is that a feasible option? — OpsEco
I was answering your question, but then I realized that there might be some confusion between userdata and CloudFormation. They are independent concepts. You can certainly do a wget and execute with just userdata. Are there other reasons you are using cloud formation? — Edwin

Benoît Sauvère Benoît Sauvère · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-10T16:21:58

You can do it with perl (extract from one of my Bash script) :

SOURCE_FILE=$1
perl -p -e 's/\"/\\"/g;' "${SOURCE_FILE}"            |  # Escape of "
perl -p -e 's/^(.*)$/"\1\\n",/g;'                    ;  # Add a " at the beginning of each lines + Add a " at the end of each lines \n",
echo '""'
# Add "" as the last line of the file (to match the , from the previous line)

AWS CloudFormation Userdata

2 Answers