[FEATURE]: Option to Upload A Completely Custom Raspberry Pi Cloud Init File

[kevinlutzer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

For both personal use and previous jobs, I have had to flash multiple Raspberry PIs (in a cluster or just single use) and then use a tool like Ansible to initialize them with the Debian packages, network config, and Ubuntu Snaps I needed for their desired purpose. This can be very tedious and it would be nice if the RPi Imager tool could further initialize the OS.

Describe the solution you would like to see implemented

Currently, the Raspberry Pi imager tool allows configuring things like the password, username, hostname, wifi networking setup, and timezone via cloud-init. It would be nice to have the option to upload a completely custom cloud-init config file. During the flashing process, the tool would copy the custom cloud-init file onto the target OS.

This would be a massive workflow improvement for me. Now, I wouldn't have to use different workflow automation tools to install and set up additional system dependencies after the RPi has been booted properly. Note that tools/services like Proxmox, and Azure VM allow you to upload a custom cloud-init file when imaging a VM.

Describe alternatives you've considered

N/A

Additional context

N/A

Version

1.9.2 (Default)

[maxnet]

It is currently not exposed in the GUI, but when starting Imager from the command-line like "rpi-imager --cli https://server/imagefile /dev/sdX" you do have "--cloudinit-userdata customfile" and "--cloudinit-networkconfig customfile" options.

[kevinlutzer]

Very cool! I didn't realize that. What would it take to build out that feature so it is supported by the GUI? In the OS Customization -> Edit settings pane, would it be possible to add an Advanced Features dropdown that would expose two uploads? One for a user-data file and another for the network-config file?

[lurch]

I hope you don't mind me asking, but why are the CLI options not sufficient for your use-case?

[curtisgalloway]

Not the OP, but chiming in here. In my use case, I want to configure a Pi to disable wifi and only have a network connection over USB to the host, so any extra packages must be loaded directly onto the image. I only wanted to write a few files, so I was able to just use --cli --first-run-script to include the files as a base64-encoded tarball directly in the script file and unpack them at first run. For bigger files, using that together with --disable-eject would allow copying over more files to the boot partition that can be processed with the first-run.sh script.

[lurch]

In my use case, I want to configure a Pi to disable wifi and only have a network connection over USB to the host, so any extra packages must be loaded directly onto the image.

I believe our "recommended" way of doing that would be to build a custom image using rpi-image-gen - see https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-rpi-image-gen-build-highly-customised-raspberry-pi-software-images/

[curtisgalloway]

Good idea - that's a lot less hacky; I'll try that next.