Reported status¶

When interacting with cloud-init, it may be useful to know whether cloud-init has run, or is currently running. Since cloud-init consists of several different stages, interacting directly with your init system might yield different reported results than one might expect, unless one has intimate knowledge of cloud-init’s boot stages.

Cloud-init status¶

To simplify this, cloud-init provides a tool, cloud-init status to report the current status of cloud-init.

$ cloud-init status
"done"

Cloud-init’s extended status¶

Cloud-init is also capable of reporting when cloud-init has not been able to complete the tasks described in a user configuration. If cloud-init has experienced issues while running, the extended status will include the word “degraded” in its status.

Cloud-init can report its internal state via the status --format json subcommand under the extended_status key.

$ cloud-init status --format json
{
    "boot_status_code": "enabled-by-generator",
    "datasource": "lxd",
    "detail": "DataSourceLXD",
    "errors": [],
    "extended_status": "degraded done",
    "init": {
        "errors": [],
        "finished": 1708550839.1837437,
        "recoverable_errors": {},
        "start": 1708550838.6881146
    },
    "init-local": {
        "errors": [],
        "finished": 1708550838.0196638,
        "recoverable_errors": {},
        "start": 1708550837.7719762
    },
    "last_update": "Wed, 21 Feb 2024 21:27:24 +0000",
    "modules-config": {
        "errors": [],
        "finished": 1708550843.8297973,
        "recoverable_errors": {
        "WARNING": [
            "Removing /etc/apt/sources.list to favor deb822 source format"
        ]
        },
        "start": 1708550843.7163966
    },
    "modules-final": {
        "errors": [],
        "finished": 1708550844.0884337,
        "recoverable_errors": {},
        "start": 1708550844.029698
    },
    "recoverable_errors": {
        "WARNING": [
        "Removing /etc/apt/sources.list to favor deb822 source format"
        ]
    },
    "stage": null,
    "status": "done"
}

See the list of all possible reported statuses:

"not started"
"running"
"done"
"error - done"
"error - running"
"degraded done"
"degraded running"
"disabled"

Cloud-init enablement status¶

Separately from the current running status described above, cloud-init can also report how it was disabled or enabled. This can be viewed by checking the boot_status_code in cloud-init status --long, which may contain any of the following states:

'unknown': ds-identify has not run yet to determine if cloud-init should be run during this boot
'disabled-by-marker-file': /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled exists which prevents cloud-init from ever running
'disabled-by-generator': ds-identify determined no applicable cloud-init datasources
'disabled-by-kernel-command-line': kernel command line contained cloud-init=disabled
'disabled-by-environment-variable': environment variable KERNEL_CMDLINE contained cloud-init=disabled
'enabled-by-kernel-command-line': kernel command line contained cloud-init=enabled
'enabled-by-generator': ds-identify detected possible cloud-init datasources
'enabled-by-sysvinit': enabled by default in SysV init environment

See our explanation of failure states for more information.