How to create a VM with password access
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Updated at November 27, 2023
Scenario description
You need to create a VM instance with password access.
Solution
In the public Linux images provided by Yandex Cloud, the option to connect via SSH using a login and password is disabled by default. You can enable it either from within your VM or when creating a VM based on metadata.
For more about VM metadata, see the documentation.
Alert
Please note that connecting with a login and password is less secure than connecting with a key pair.
Example of metadata to create a username user with the 12345678 password:
#cloud-config
datasource:
Ec2:
strict_id: false
ssh_pwauth: yes
users:
- name: username
sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
shell: /bin/bash
chpasswd:
list: |
username:12345678
expire: False
You can deliver metadata when creating a VM using the CLI, API, or Terraform. Example of a CLI command:
yc compute instance create --name instance --zone ru-central1-a \
--network-interface subnet-name=default-ru-central1-a,nat-ip-version=ipv4 \
--create-boot-disk image-folder-id=standard-images,image-family=ubuntu-2204-lts \
--metadata-from-file user-data=metadata.yaml