I am attempting to spin up an ec2 instance using AWS CDK, for the most part it works great but I want the userData to persist so it runs on each boot... Annoyingly this is not documented (anywhere I can find) and I just cant figure out where/how to define it. Below is my code that works but because the userdata is by forWindows() I cannot just add xxx.addCommands('<persist>true</persist>') because the forWindows() puts the code in tags...
// Instance details
const ssmaUserData = UserData.forWindows()
ssmaUserData.addCommands('mkdir -p C:/helloworld; ');
const ec2Instance = new ec2.Instance(this, 'SdkInstance', {
vpc,
instanceType: ec2.InstanceType.of(ec2.InstanceClass.T3, ec2.InstanceSize.NANO),
machineImage: awsAMI,
securityGroup: mySecurityGroup,
vpcSubnets: {subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC},
keyName: "EC2Connect",
userData: ssmaUserData
});
I have attempted to use ssmaUserData.addOnExitCommands("<persist>true</persist>") and variants of that but without success, anyone know how to get this done?
Below are the logs that indicate that this is not running with persistence...
2021/03/11 12:56:51Z: Userdata execution begins
2021/03/11 12:56:51Z: Zero or more than one <persist> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 12:56:51Z: Unregistering the persist scheduled task
2021/03/11 12:56:55Z: Zero or more than one <runAsLocalSystem> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 12:56:55Z: Zero or more than one <script> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 12:56:55Z: Zero or more than one <powershellArguments> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 12:56:55Z: <powershell> tag was provided.. running powershell content
2021/03/11 13:08:34Z: Userdata execution begins
2021/03/11 13:08:34Z: Zero or more than one <persist> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 13:08:34Z: Unregistering the persist scheduled task
2021/03/11 13:08:37Z: Zero or more than one <runAsLocalSystem> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 13:08:37Z: Zero or more than one <script> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 13:08:37Z: Zero or more than one <powershellArguments> tag was not provided
2021/03/11 13:08:37Z: <powershell> tag was provided.. running powershell content
2021/03/11 13:08:42Z: Message: The output from user scripts:
Got it! So whenever I used the UserData.forWindows() which is well documented by AWS it would automatically add the <PowerShell> tags which mean if I defined <Persist> it would be encompass the tag... To get around this I needed to use UserData.custom() instead. I have tested the code below and it is working a great!
const script = `
<powershell>
Start-Transcript -OutputDirectory C:/
Write-Output HelloWorld
Stop-Transcript
</powershell>
<persist>true</persist>
`;
const ssmaUserData = UserData.custom(script)
const ec2Instance = new ec2.Instance(this, 'SdkInstance', {
vpc,
instanceType: ec2.InstanceType.of(ec2.InstanceClass.T3, ec2.InstanceSize.NANO),
machineImage: awsAMI,
securityGroup: mySecurityGroup,
vpcSubnets: {subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC},
keyName: "EC2Connect",
userData: ssmaUserData,
});