How to run user_data after droplet creation

It’s hard to know exactly where your error is without seeing the rest of the code or the error logs. In general, you seem to going in the right direction. Here’s a working example:

<?php
$user_data = <<<EOD
#!/bin/bash
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install nginx
export HOSTNAME=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/hostname)
export PUBLIC_IPV4=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/interfaces/public/0/ipv4/address)
echo Droplet: \$HOSTNAME, IP Address: \$PUBLIC_IPV4 > /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html
EOD;

$data = array(
    'name'               => 'nginx-droplet',
    'region'             => 'nyc3',
    'size'               => '512mb',
    'image'              => 'ubuntu-14-04-x64',
    'user_data'          => $user_data
);

$data_string = json_encode($data);

$ch = curl_init('https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN_API_HERE',
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))
);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
print_r($result);
?>

Note that the $HOSTNAME is escaped like \$HOSTNAME in order to prevent PHP from attempting to treat it as a variable.

For more information on the DigitalOcean metadata service see: An Introduction to Droplet Metadata

You might also want to check out the community contributed PHP bindings for DgitialOcean’s APIv2.

Thanks . I got an error with this coding though as i dint get the hostname and ip to show on the html file this was the coding used in v 1 api now i am using v2 export HOSTNAME=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/hostname) export PUBLIC_IPV4=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/interfaces/public/0/ipv4/address) echo Droplet: $HOSTNAME, IP Address: $PUBLIC_IPV4 > /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

as i am using v2 api now ,How can i get the hostname with the new API . The new api is not easy to understand for me as i am beginner in coding. Any help would be appreciated Thanks.