Packer, Cloud-Init, and OpenStack

[Mark]

All,

Trying to use packer to maintain our Linux OpenStack images.  We use cloud-init to lay down base configurations at deploy time and would like to move this process to a lower level and do it during image creation.  

As you can see below I am referencing an external file that has instructions for cloud-init.  This same methodology works perfectly in our Heat templates, however, in Heat we also have user_data_format set to RAW, which is NOT the default for OpenStack and not an acceptable parameter for packer. 

When using Packer the entire #cloud-config section is being ignored.

Is there a better way to pass cloud-init instructions during the image creation process?  

packer config .json contents

{

  "builders": [{

    "type": "openstack",

    "ssh_username": "centos",

    "image_name": "cent7-cloudinit",

    "source_image": "a4331a95-6741-4161-85a5-4e322c2a69bf",

    "flavor": "m1.small",

    "identity_endpoint": "http://x.x.x.x:5000/v3",

    "username": "",

    "password": "",

    "domain_name": "Default",

    "region": "RegionOne",

    "image_visibility": "public", 

    "networks": "78c8405e-e43c-46d1-b646-f513bf85eb9f",

    "floating_ip_network": "external_network",

    "user_data_file": "base.sh"

  }]

}

base.sh contents:

#cloud-config

yum_repos:

  salt-repo:

    baseurl: https://repo.saltstack.com/yum/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/latest

    name: SaltStack repo for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever

    enabled: true

    gpgcheck: true

    gpgkey: 'https://repo.saltstack.com/yum/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/latest/SALTSTACK-GPG-KEY.pub https://repo.saltstack.com/yum/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/latest/base/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7'

packages:

  - python-msgpack 

  - python-psutil 

  - python-zmq 

  - python-futures

  - zeromq 

  - libsodium 

  - systemd-python 

  - libtomcrypt 

  - libtommath

  - pciutils 

  - python-tornado 

  - python2-crypto