How to use cloud-init with debian Vagrant boxes?

It seems that cloud-init is not pre-installed in the debian/bookworm64 Vagrant image as well as debian/bullseye64. I did not find any other relevant image in search. Is there a way to make cloud-init to execute the user script nonetheless, maybe with some local hacks?

Steps to reproduce:

create a Vagrantfile using vagrant init debian/bookworm64

follow official steps to enable cloud-init (e.g. enable experimental features etc.) and add a section to Vagrantfile:

config.vm.cloud_init :user_data do |cloud_init|
  cloud_init.content_type = "text/cloud-config"
  cloud_init.path = "userdata-local.yml"
end

create a simple userdata-local.yml file in the same directory e.g.
```
runcmd:
  - echo "Hello world"
```

The end result of running vagrant up is the error cloud-init is not found. Please ensure that cloud-init is installed and available on path for guest xyz.

Solution

I did not find any other relevant image in search.

Consider using cloud images which have cloud-init pre-installed.

Is there a way to make cloud-init to execute the user script nonetheless, maybe with some local hacks

If cloud-init is not installed, cloud-init certainly will not be running on your image on first boot.

What you could possibly do (if you would rather not use a cloud image) is install cloud-init after your image boots, then take a snapshot and use that as a base image to boot cloud-init instances from.