How to base64 encode and upload userdata for EC2 Launch Template

[Colin Percival]

On 3/11/19 2:42 AM, Rafal Lukawiecki wrote:
> I hope someone can explain, as I have been lost in this for over a week. I would like to pass a small (4-5kB) tarball of files for the built-in cloud init script of the official FreeBSD 12.0 EC2 AMI to get untarred and processed (>, >>, or #!) upon instance launch. I have successfully done it for over 2 years using Launch Configurations but I cannot make it work using the new Launch Templates.

Is this a tarball, or a compressed tarball?

There's a longstanding bug (which I'm told is going to get fixed eventually!)
in the AWS Console whereby any non-7-bit-clean user-data files get mangled
and come out with each byte UTF-8 encoded.  I was only aware of this as an
issue with the Console but it's entirely possible that someone at Amazon wrote
the same bug in multiple places.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid