Yeah, I'm going with a tiny dedicated infra bootstrapping box with all the tools I'd need to bootstrap the main infrastructure.

Using a hypervisor (proxmox in this case) I have some prebuilt vms's and container images that I can use for the bootstrap instances so i'd not need to completely hand roll it again should it be needed.

I'm looking at cloudinit scripts to see if that's useful for this.

I really like packer but I'm hesitant to rely on anything hashicorp until whatever they have going on shakes out.

Then I just load up the bootstrap box with the main infra code and use woodpecker to deploy.

Code and config backed up, also mirrored to newly created infra forgejo instances, just in case.

If I can get a semi presentable cloud init based bootstrap system working nicely I'll stick it somewhere people can get to it, in case it's useful to someone else.