Ubuntu 26.04 LTS’s minimal cloud images have been missing curl – accidentally, it turns out, so Canonical has put it back.
Curl is a commonly-used command-line tool for fetching files from remote servers. It’s called on in countless install scripts, CI pipelines and one-liners you’ve no doubt pasted into your terminal without thinking twice about.
But the package has been missing from the server-cloud-minimal images of 26.04 to date. That caught those running pared-back cloud installs unawares, breaking expected workflows, has it had been available in previous versions.
The manual fix is to install curl from the repos which, in the grand scheme, isn’t a huge effort.
Curl is preinstalled in the full-size server and cloud images of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (an earlier). It had been present in the minimal variants too, albeit not intentionally.
The “bug” was caused because curl was not explicitly listed in the minimal cloud sever ‘seed’ (the list of core packages). Instead it hitched a ride as a dependency of pollinate (an entropy-seeding tool for cloud). Pollinate was dropped in 26.04, and curl with it.
Canonical’s engineer Gauthier Jolly noted that “while pollinate wasn’t a utility the user’s (sic) might expect, curl certainly is and we shouldn’t break LTS users like this”.
Backing its re-introduction, Canonical’s Christian Ehrhardt added that “the intention of the former SRU change was only to drop pollinate”.
Curl has now been explicitly added to the server-cloud-minimal seed. An update is rolling out, so existing installs should pull in the missing package on their next system update.
However, anyone using the minimal cloud and server images shouldn’t get too comfortable having curl present.
Canonical’s engineers are debating whether to formally drop curl from the minimal install seed ahead of Ubuntu 26.10 – note: seed, not the archive, lest anyone panic – as the point of a minimal image is to be, well, minimal and curl is not integral to booting.