write_files defer not using ownership for new folders

Thanks for the report, jlanzac.

I have reproduced the case and I think inheriting the ownership for newly required created folders is what the user would expect.

So, is there a plan to fix it?
In addition, if the folder for the created file does not exist, we need to have the appropriate permissions to create the folder. When we config write_files, should we ensure that the directory must exist?

If you need to create a directory, we can use the same permission as the new file.

While this is a bug to be fixed, this is not on the upstream's team's roadmap for the immediate future. That may change if it proves to be a significant issue for multiple people. Contributions are always welcome too!

I am glad to fix it.

zhan9san, thanks for helping to make cloud-init better. Please, refer to cloud-init's development documentation[1] and submit a PR.

If you have any question, the #cloud-init IRC channel on Libera is available for a more dynamic interaction.

[1] https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/development/index.html

Hi

Would it be possible to add a new module to handle the directory feature?
Proposed new module name is 'File'.

I tried to add 'chownbyname' in 'ensure_dir' method directly, which will only change the ownership for parent directory only.

But I have some concerns.

As 'os.makedirs' will create directories recursively by default, we can not easily know which of them are newly created. So there would introduce much more logic to detect which directories is newly created and which exist already.

e.g.

- path: /home/ubuntu/foo/bar/baz/file-in.txt

We have to check whether all '/home/ubuntu/foo/bar/baz', '/home/ubuntu/foo/bar' and '/home/ubuntu/foo' exist. If all of them don't exist, we have to change ownership for all of them.

It is inspired by shixuantong (sxt1001)'s idea. If so, users have to ensure the directory exists first via 'file' module and then write out arbitrary content to files via 'Write Files' module.

Reference:
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/blob/94a00492b11995dd9278605eb29ee4b096ce3a90/cloudinit/util.py#L1795
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/file_module.html#parameter-recurse

This bug is believed to be fixed in cloud-init in version 23.1. If this is still a problem for you, please make a comment and set the state back to New

Thank you.

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/4023