FreeBSD on Hetzner Cloud 2: Cloud Init Boogaloo

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So in my previous post I detailed the packer build to pull down the FreeBSD Cloud image and write it to /dev/sda from the Hetzner rescue OS. I tested nuageinit but, understandably it doesn’t support pulling metadata from IMDS.

However, cloud-init does, so I decided to tackle trying to shoe horn cloud-init into the FreeBSD image. Now there is probably a clever way to build a custom FreeBSD image with cloud-init pre-baked in but this was the way I thought it would be ’easy'.

Cloud-Init on Grant Bevis

FreeBSD on Hetzner Cloud 2: Cloud Init Boogaloo