Authoring multipart Ubuntu cloud-init configuration with Java

Canonical's wonderful Amazon EC2 Images come with a powerful configuration tool called cloud-init that lets you pass configuration via user-data. One of the more interesting capabilities is that cloud-init allows a combination of different configuration payloads using MIME as a system for aggregating parts.

Below is an example of how to create a multipart configuration compatible with cloud-init using Java:

import java.util.Properties;

import javax.mail.Session;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeBodyPart;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeMessage;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart;


public class CloudInitMultipart {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String config = "#cloud-config\n" 
            + "mounts:\n" 
            + " - [ sdf, /mnt/data, \"auto\", \"defaults,nobootwait\", \"0\", \"0\" ]\n\n" 
            + "packages:\n"
            + " - emacs23-nox\n\n";
        MimeMultipart mime = new MimeMultipart();
        MimeBodyPart part1 = new MimeBodyPart();
        part1.setText(config, "us-ascii", "cloud-config");
        part1.setFileName("cloud-config.txt");
        MimeBodyPart part2 = new MimeBodyPart();
        String script = "#!/bin/bash\n\n" 
            + "NOW=`date +%s`\n" 
            + "touch /mnt/$NOW";
        part2.setText(script, "us-ascii", "x-shellscript");
        part2.setFileName("runme.sh");
        mime.addBodyPart(part1);
        mime.addBodyPart(part2);
        MimeMessage msg = new MimeMessage(Session.getDefaultInstance(new Properties()));
        msg.setContent(mime);
        msg.writeTo(System.out);
    }
}

This will create a multipart configuration combining a cloud-config element which installs emacs and creates an fstab entry, and also runs a bash script that creates a file. The output can then be used as user-data for launching an EC2 instance with this configuration.