Startup scripts allow you to configure and setup your instance, meaning automatically running scripts or installing software as soon as the instance has booted for the first time.
We offer both, predefined installer scripts like the NVIDIA® GPU driver in the dashboard or the possibility to run any custom user-defined startup script via the API.
Let's first take one step back. When you create a new instance it contains all the software that comes with the image that you selected. For example, in the case of Ubuntu 24.04 all the software that comes with a vanilla Ubuntu 24.04 installation.
For a lot of applications, especially GPU applications you will need additional software to be installed in order to successfully run those applications.
For example, to install and run TensorFlow on a NVIDIA® GPU, you will also need a NVIDIA® GPU driver, NVIDIA® CUDA and of course installing TensorFlow itself. In order to set up the most common types of software like the GPU driver, we will provide predefined startup scripts to make it easier to be up and running.
With startup scripts, you can inject a script that is automatically executed after the instance becomes active. Under the hood, it uses a mechanism called cloud-init that is also used to deploy your public SSH key on the instance.
Note: The startup script is executed after the instance is booted and active, meaning if you log in to your instance the execution might still happen in the background.
Please don't snapshot, shutdown or restart your instance while a startup script is running.
You can check the logs of your startup scripts via
| tail -f /var/log/cloud-init-output.log |
Also, you can check the status of your startup script with
| cloud-init status |
Installing a NVIDIA® GPU Driver
Note: Installing the driver will take approximately 6–7 minutes after the instance becomes active. During this time, the GPU will not be available for use. Do not create a snapshot or restart the instance during this period, as it will cause the driver installation to fail.
First you should wait until the installation is done:
| cloud-init status --wait |
You can verify the NVIDIA driver installation using the NVIDIA System Management Interface utility by running:
| nvidia-smi |
Once the installation is done you should see a nvidia-smi response like this one.
Nvidia-smi response
Via the Compute Dashboard
Currently, we support many versions of NVIDIA® Data Center GPU Driver. You can install any version of your choice on the instance, just select the version you would like to install, on the Instance creation flow.
Under the Drivers section, you can select to install the desired NVIDIA® Data Center GPU Driver
Via the public Compute API
To install the NVIDIA® GPU driver version 535 on your instance via the public Compute API, you can pass the following shell script as startup_script in your create instance request metadata parameter. To install the driver version 535, we use the following script, which we then convert to a JSON string with
| cat your-startup-script.sh | jq -Rs |
and then pass the JSON string to the metadata.startup_script parameter.
If you use httpie or a similar program that supports httpie nested JSON syntax you can simplify this even further:
| metadata[startup_script]="$(cat your-startup-script.sh)" |
Startup script in clean bash
#!/bin/bash set -eo pipefail NVIDIA_MAJOR_VERSION=535 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive # remove nouveau module if present if lsmod | grep -q nouveau; then rmmod -v nouveau fi apt-get update apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y nvidia-driver-$NVIDIA_MAJOR_VERSION-server nvidia-smi # loads the driver modules sed -i 's/--no-persistence-mode/--persistence-mode/g' /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced.service systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart nvidia-persistenced.service |
Startup script as JSON string passed to the public API as metadata parameter
"metadata": {"startup_script": "#!/bin/bash\nset -eo pipefail\n\nNVIDIA_MAJOR_VERSION=535\nexport DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive\n\n# remove nouveau module if present\nif lsmod | grep -q nouveau; then\n rmmod -v nouveau\nfi\n\napt-get update\napt-get install --no-install-recommends -y nvidia-driver-$NVIDIA_MAJOR_VERSION-server\n\nnvidia-smi # loads the driver modules\n\nsed -i 's/--no-persistence-mode/--persistence-mode/g' /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced.service\nsystemctl daemon-reload\n\nsystemctl restart nvidia-persistenced.service\n"} |