By danielmd
What does the Enable User Data option provide? I don’t understand the meaning.
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The Enable User Data setting allows you to pass arbitrary data into the user-data key of the DigitalOcean Metadata service. You can then retrieve that data on your droplet by running:
curl -w "\n" http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/user-data
On it’s own, that’s not very exciting but it allows for some interesting things when you combine it with a program called CloudInit that is installed by default on Ubuntu 14.04 and up as well as CentOS 7. It processes the user data and runs it on the droplet. For instance, you could put a bash script in there and it will be run on first boot. People use this to do a lot of initial set up on their droplets like installing packages. For more info, see this tutorial:
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