First boot customization?

[inferiorhumanorgans]

Per this comment it sounds like cloud-init support was the end goal. However it looks like that's been abandoned and customizing the first boot is no longer (officially) supported? Are there any plans to at least document config.toml which has lots of paper cuts that aren't documented anywhere?

#82 (comment)

[MichaIng]

With the Raspberry Pi Imager, you can pre-configure the image: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-started.html#raspberry-pi-imager

[inferiorhumanorgans]

Sorry, I should clarify: in a repeatable and scriptable manner. Before bookworm and the systemd disaster this was possible in a supported manner. This also doesn't address the underlying question: has cloud-init been abandoned?

[MichaIng]

Ah right, that is somewhat lacking. cloud-init AFAIK is not abandoned, is still the final goal, but no one started working on it yet/no ETA.

On first boot, /usr/lib/raspberrypi-sys-mods/firstboot is executed. So that one can be used for customization. It also handles the custom.toml, which is finally done by the Python script /usr/lib/raspberrypi-sys-mods/init_config. So from that script you can derive available settings. Like this should create a user with password and enable SSH with password authentication:

[user]
name = "michaing"
password = "some_plain_password"
is_encrypted = false

[ssh]
enabled = true
password_authentication = true

The password can be also given encrypted, but would need to check the algorithm. An SSH key can be provided, but I am currently not sure how to define it correctly. Probably like this as array:

authorized_keys = [ "ssh-ed25519 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX comment" ]