Test Unreleased Packages

Testing a pre-built package is the easiest way to test the latest code. Pre-release packages and daily packages are two ways to accomplish this before it becomes available in official distro repositories and cloud images.

If you must modify the code locally, you will need to build from source instead.

Test pre-release packages

After the cloud-init team creates an upstream release, cloud-init will be released in the -proposed APT repository for a period of testing which provides SRU updates to multiple Ubuntu releases. Users are encouraged to test their workloads on pending releases so bugs can be caught and fixed prior to becoming more broadly available via the -updates repository. This guide describes how to test the pre-release package on Ubuntu.

Add the -proposed repository pocket

The -proposed repository pocket will contain the cloud-init package to be tested prior to release in the -updates pocket.

echo "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc)-proposed main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proposed.list
apt update

Install the pre-release cloud-init package

apt install cloud-init

Test the package

Whatever workload you use cloud-init for in production is the best one to test. This ensures that you can discover and report any bugs that the cloud-init developers missed during testing before cloud-init gets released more broadly.

If issues are found during testing, please file a new cloud-init bug.

Remove the proposed repository

Do this to avoid unintentionally installing other unreleased packages.

rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proposed.list
apt update

Remove artifacts and reboot

This will cause cloud-init to rerun as if it is a first boot.

sudo cloud-init clean --logs --reboot

Test daily packages

Daily builds allow one to test the latest upstream code for the newest features and bug fixes without building from source.

For Ubuntu, install from the Daily PPA.

For CentOS, install from COPR.