Configuring instances with user-defined guest policies

Container-Optimized OS includes the OS Config agent. You can use OS Config's guest policies to configure your instance. packages and packageRepositories features of guest policies are not supported on Container-Optimized OS.

To enable OS Config and create a guest policy, see Enable OS Config agent and Create a guest policy, respectively.

Here is an example that shows how users can use assignment and recipes features of guest policies to create a file on instances located at us-central1-a.

assignment:
  zones:
  - us-central1-a
recipes:
- name: recipe-runscript
  desiredState: INSTALLED
  installSteps:
  - scriptRun:
      interpreter: SHELL
      script: touch /tmp/TOUCH_FILE

Note: While it is optional to provide an interpreter on other distros, Container-Optimized OS requires interpreter to execute the given script.

Note: While recipes are run once-per-instance on other distros, on Container-Optimized OS, recipes are run on every boot. This is because most of the directories are stateless; therefore, changes made by recipes will not persist across reboots. See Disks and Filesystem for more information on Container-Optimized OS's filesystem.