Packer user data not running with amazon-ebs

Packer
1

I have a very basic user data script that packer is using, but when I check it looks like packer doesn’t run the .sh script at all.

The user data .sh script as a file is:

echo "User data script started" >>/var/log/user_data.log

and my amazon-ebs source that points to the file:

source "amazon-ebs" "amznlnx2023-rendernode-ami" {
  tags = merge(
    { "packer_source" : "amazon-ebs.amznlnx2023-rendernode-ami" },
    { "ami_role" : "firehawk_amznlnx2023_rendernode_ami" },
    { "Name" : "firehawk_amznlnx2023_rendernode_ami" },
    local.common_ami_tags
  )
  ami_description         = "An Amazon Linux 2023 AMI that will accept connections from hosts with TLS Certs."
  ami_name                = "firehawk-rendernode-amznlnx2023-${local.timestamp}-{{uuid}}"
  temporary_key_pair_type = "ed25519"
  instance_type           = "t2.small"
  region                  = var.aws_region
  source_ami_filter {
    filters = {
      "tag:ami_role" : "amznlnx2023_base_ami",
      "tag:packer_template" : "firehawk-base-ami",
      "tag:commit_hash" : var.ingress_commit_hash,
      "tag:commit_hash_short" : var.ingress_commit_hash_short,
      "tag:resourcetier" : var.resourcetier,
    }
    most_recent = true
    owners      = [var.account_id]
  }
  ssh_username = "ec2-user"
  iam_instance_profile = var.packer_iam_profile_name # provide read and write s3 access for updating and retrieving installers

  launch_block_device_mappings {
    device_name           = "/dev/xvda"
    volume_size           = 25
    volume_type           = "gp3"
    delete_on_termination = true
  }

  user_data = file("${path.root}/scripts/amazon_linux_user_data.sh")

}

I also tried:

user_data_file = "${path.root}/scripts/amazon_linux_user_data.sh"

My image then builds and runs other operations (takes about 5 mins to build), and if I check the log output path nothing is there so user data must not be running. Any ideas what I’m missing here? I couldn’t see any examples in the docs so I’m assuming this is the way to use it.