It looks like it maybe part of a hashicorp tool

how are others doing it?

oh, one project of ours is also using userdata. It uses terraform

data cloudinit_config

where it references an external yml file. The yml file has an entry

write_files:

and under it are the path, owner, permissions, encoding and content. I don't know if the yml file content is specific for terraform though

I found something similar but do I just import cloudinit like

import cloudinit

?

cloudconfig = cloudinit.get_config(
      base64_encode = False,
      gzip = False,
      parts = [
        cloudinit.GetConfigPartArgs(
          content = "#cloudconfig\npackages:\n- prometheus-node-exporter",
          content_type = "text/cloud-config",
          filename = "init.cfg"
        )
      ]
    )

ah it said 🙂

pip3 install pulumi_cloudinit