Packer templates

Packer templates are used to:

• automagically create OS images with upgraded packages
• provision user defined changes to created image
• remove user defined elements from image
• build single version of OS image for multiple hypervisors

Features

Operating Systems

• Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty)
• Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial)
• Debian 8 (jessie)

Providers

• qemu
• docker
• virtualbox
• vagrant/libvirt
• vagrant/virtualbox
• digitalocean

Usage

Install Packer

PACKER_URL="https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/packer/packer_0.8.2_linux_amd64.zip"
PACKER_ZIP=$(basename ${PACKER_URL})
PACKER_ZIP_MD5="bc37abe5e183a11bd8c1b2efc385059b"

mkdir -p ~/bin/packer
cd ~/bin/packer
export PATH="${PATH}:~/bin/packer"

wget -O ${PACKER_ZIP} ${PACKER_URL}
echo "${PACKER_ZIP_MD5}  ${PACKER_ZIP}" >> md5sum
md5sum -c --status md5sum

unzip ${PACKER_ZIP}

Image build

Enter build directory by selecting OS type and version. You should see file template.json.

Start building some images:

packer build -only=virtualbox-iso template.json

Development

Directory http/ contains OS installer config files (preseed/kickstart/..)

Directory scripts/ contains set of scripts for provision after image build.

Notes

• some builders cannot work at the same time (by design)