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Validate User Data

After preparing or modifying your user-data file, you can validate your user data before using it to build the Edge installer ISO. This allows you to be confident that your user data follows the expected schema and avoid having to rebuild Edge artifacts due to user data errors. The following issues will be flagged through validation:

  • YAML formatting issues.
  • Omission of the #cloud-config header.
  • Missing required fields or fields containing incorrect data types.

This guide provides instructions on how to validate the user data manually without triggering an actual build. However, this process is also executed automatically when you build the Edge installer ISO.

Prerequisites​

  • A physical or virtual Linux machine with AMD64 (also known as x86_64) processor architecture to build the Edge artifacts. You can issue the following command in the terminal to check your processor architecture.

    uname -m

  • You have cloned the CanvOS repository.

  • You have a file named user-data in your CanvOS directory. For more information on how to prepare the user-data file, refer to Prepare User Data.

Validate User Data​

From the CanvOS directory, issue the following command.

sudo ./earthly.sh +validate-user-data

If the output is similar to the following, it means that the user data is valid and will be applied to the Edge host.

warning

This only checks that the user data conforms to the expected schema and will not catch issues with the data itself. For example, if your user data contained an expired registration token, this will not be flagged by the validation script.

+validate-user-data | time=*2024-07-25T20:19:172* level=info msg="Validation successful"

If the data does not pass the validation, the output will display the encountered error. For example, if the stylus.registryCredentials.password field is present but no value is provided, the following error will be displayed in the output.

Error: invalid JSON: stylus.registryCredentials.password: Invalid type. Expected: string, given: null

Validate​

  1. Build an Edge installer ISO with the user data and install an Edge host. For more information, refer to Build Installer ISO.

  2. Confirm that the user data you provided has been applied. For example, if you configured users in your user data and you were able to use the credentials to establish an SSH connection to your Edge host, then you can confirm that the user data has been applied.