I recently had a problem with some historic CloudFormation where the user and their home directory was not being created. The problem and the solution were not complicated but my Google search returned nothing directly related to the problem except the AWS docs on the configuration syntax and there were no errors in the init log.

The user and their associated home directory were not being created which then meant when the scripting in UserData ran (which relied on a certain directory structure) I was getting a “directory not found” error.

The problem and solution are ridiculously straight-forward. The cfn-init scripts were not being installed or run. Without them configuration data in Metadata is not run, which is what the documentation in AWS::CloudFormation::Init pretty much says. I adapted this gist to install cfn-init and everything sprang into life again.

The reason I struggled so much with the problem was that I was modifying existing CloudFormation that had generated a successfully running application previous to my changes.

It took me hours to figure out that while the current version of the CloudFormation made no mention of cfn-init and yet apparently worked was simply because the necessary changes had not been checked into the source repository. Without a simple way to go back and review the actual CloudFormation config that was used (hopefully something that might change in a future version of CloudFormation) I assumed that what was missing was my knowledge and there was some other way of getting the Metadata to execute.