user_data in aws_launch_configuration can't be gzip/base64

[hashibot]

This issue was originally opened by @dodwmd as hashicorp/terraform#11488. It was migrated here as part of the provider split. The original body of the issue is below.

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Hi there,

Not really a bug. Most likely could be dealt with a documentation update to state that user_data in a aws_launch_configuration shouldn't be encoded when using template_cloudinit_config and doing multi-part configs.

[Ninir]

Hey @dodwmd,

Martin worked on providing such stuff here: #850, so I assume this can be closed.

@apparentlymart Do you confirm? if so, I'll let you close this one :)

[apparentlymart]

Thanks for pointing this out, @Ninir.

Indeed the change in #850 adds a new attribute user_data_base64 that takes data that's already base64-encoded, including the output of template_cloudinit_config when gzip = true and base64 = true.

In future we will deprecate and eventually remove the broken combination of gzip = true and base64 = false, because Terraform strings are treated as UTF-8 and so it's not safe to pass around general binary data, as can be see in my comment on #754.

So with all of that said, I'm going to close this. The new attribute is not yet included in a stable release, but it should be included in the next one. (Note that the AWS provider is now released separately from Terraform core, so it will not be necessary to upgrade Terraform itself to get this new feature.)

[ghost]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

If you feel this issue should be reopened, we encourage creating a new issue linking back to this one for added context. Thanks!