Vultr Customer Portal

1. Navigate to Products and click Compute.
2. Click your target Vultr Optimized Cloud Compute instance to open its management page.
3. Navigate to the User-Data tab.
4. Enter your script or cloud config in the Cloud-Init User-Data field.
5. Click Update to apply the changes.

Vultr API

1. Send a GET request to the List Instances endpoint and note your target instance’s ID.
   console

   $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances" \
     -X GET \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}"
   

2. Send a PATCH request to the Update Instance endpoint to update the instance’s Cloud-Init user data.
   console

   $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances/{instance-id}" \
     -X PATCH \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{
       "user_data" : "<cloud-init-data>",
     }'

Vultr CLI

1. List all available instances and note your target instance’s ID.
   console

   $ vultr-cli instance list
   

2. Upload new Cloud-Init user data to the instance from a file on your workstation.
   console

   $ vultr-cli instance user-data set <instance-id> --userdata "<script-path>"

Terraform

Cloud-Init user data can only be set during instance creation in Terraform and cannot be updated on an existing instance without recreating it.

1. Open your Terraform configuration for the new Optimized Cloud Compute instance.
2. Add the user_data argument to the instance resource to run a script at first boot.
   terraform

   resource "vultr_instance" "occ" {
       # ...existing fields (region, plan, os_id, label, etc.)
   
       user_data = <<-EOT
       #!/bin/bash
       apt-get update -y
       apt-get install -y nginx
       systemctl enable --now nginx
       EOT
   }
   

3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

   Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.