Important:
This documentation has been moved and is now being maintained as part of the Ubuntu Installer documentation. For the up-to-date version of this content, please refer to this version instead.
The intent of this page is to provide simple instructions to perform an autoinstall in a VM on your machine.
This page assumes that you are willing to install the latest Ubuntu release available (23.10 at the time of writing). For other releases, you would need to substitute the name of the ISO image but the instructions should otherwise remain the same.
This page also assumes you are on the amd64 architecture. There is a version for s390x too.
Providing the autoinstall data over the network
This method is the one that generalises most easily to doing an entirely network-based install, where a machine netboots and is then automatically installed.
Download the ISO
Go to the 23.10 ISO download page and download the latest Ubuntu 23.10 live-server ISO.
Mount the ISO
sudo mount -r ~/Downloads/ubuntu-23.10-live-server-amd64.iso /mnt
Write your autoinstall config
This means creating cloud-init config as follows:
mkdir -p ~/www
cd ~/www
cat > user-data << 'EOF'
#cloud-config
autoinstall:
version: 1
identity:
hostname: ubuntu-server
password: "$6$exDY1mhS4KUYCE/2$zmn9ToZwTKLhCw.b4/b.ZRTIZM30JZ4QrOQ2aOXJ8yk96xpcCof0kxKwuX1kqLG/ygbJ1f8wxED22bTL4F46P0"
username: ubuntu
EOF
touch meta-data
The crypted password is just “ubuntu”.
Serve the cloud-init config over HTTP
Leave this running in a new terminal window:
cd ~/www
python3 -m http.server 3003
Create a target disk
truncate -s 10G image.img
Run the install!
kvm -no-reboot -m 2048 \
-drive file=image.img,format=raw,cache=none,if=virtio \
-cdrom ~/Downloads/ubuntu-23.10-live-server-amd64.iso \
-kernel /mnt/casper/vmlinuz \
-initrd /mnt/casper/initrd \
-append 'autoinstall ds=nocloud-net;s=http://_gateway:3003/'
This will boot, download the config from the server set up in the previous step, and run the install. The installer reboots at the end but the -no-reboot flag to kvm means that kvm will exit when this happens. It should take about 5 minutes.
Boot the installed system
kvm -no-reboot -m 2048 \
-drive file=image.img,format=raw,cache=none,if=virtio
This will boot into the freshly installed system and you should be able to log in as ubuntu/ubuntu.
Using another volume to provide the autoinstall config
This is the method to use when you want to create media that you can just plug into a system to have it be installed.
Download the live-server ISO
Go to the 23.10 ISO download page and download the latest Ubuntu 23.10 live-server ISO.
Create your user-data and meta-data files
mkdir -p ~/cidata
cd ~/cidata
cat > user-data << 'EOF'
#cloud-config
autoinstall:
version: 1
identity:
hostname: ubuntu-server
password: "$6$exDY1mhS4KUYCE/2$zmn9ToZwTKLhCw.b4/b.ZRTIZM30JZ4QrOQ2aOXJ8yk96xpcCof0kxKwuX1kqLG/ygbJ1f8wxED22bTL4F46P0"
username: ubuntu
EOF
touch meta-data
The crypted password is just “ubuntu”.
Create an ISO to use as a cloud-init data source
sudo apt install cloud-image-utils
cloud-localds ~/seed.iso user-data meta-data
Create a target disk
truncate -s 10G image.img
Run the install!
kvm -no-reboot -m 2048 \
-drive file=image.img,format=raw,cache=none,if=virtio \
-drive file=~/seed.iso,format=raw,cache=none,if=virtio \
-cdrom ~/Downloads/ubuntu-23.10-live-server-amd64.iso
This will boot and run the install. Unless you interrupt boot to add autoinstall to the kernel command line, the installer will prompt for confirmation before touching the disk.
The installer reboots at the end but the -no-reboot flag to kvm means that kvm will exit when this happens.
The whole process should take about 5 minutes.
Boot the installed system
kvm -no-reboot -m 2048 \
-drive file=image.img,format=raw,cache=none,if=virtio
This will boot into the freshly installed system and you should be able to log in as ubuntu/ubuntu.
