How to achieve zero-touch bootstrap when loading Talos ISO on bare-metal?

[HLomba]

Hi Talos Team,

I'm deploying Talos Linux on bare-metal servers and trying to achieve zero-touch provisioning - load the ISO and have the cluster bootstrap automatically without any manual intervention.

We're building a custom ISO that already contains everything needed embedded:

• Machine config pre-applied
• All Kubernetes container images (air-gap image cache)
• Network and cluster configuration

The Problem:
The ISO installs perfectly and nodes come up ready, but they wait for talosctl bootstrap. I need the node to complete the bootstrap autonomously, without requiring:

• Network connectivity to run talosctl from external machine
• Operator intervention
• External orchestration tools

Questions:

• Is there a supported way to achieve zero-touch bootstrap in Talos?
• Can Extension Services run talosctl bootstrap locally on the node itself?
• Are there machine config options or kernel parameters that enable auto-bootstrap?
• How do others achieve ZTP (zero touch provisioning) in similar scenarios?

Any guidance appreciated!

[smira]

First of all, what I will post below is not recommended. It might break in fun ways for any setup with HA controlplane.

Second, it will only work for clusters consisting of a single controlplane node.

But, if you still want this, you can change .machine.type to be init instead of controlplane, and it will bootstrap itself.