Creation of standard VM images with Packer

Reference

These Packer templates are derived from the templates for building Vagrant boxes for various OS produced by the Bento Project, produced under Apache 2 license.

Pre-requirements

• Hypervisor installed to generate the required type of boxes (e.g. VirtualBox, VMware, Parallels, etc.)
• Packer >=1.6.5
• Optional:
  • Vagrant >=2.2
  • An Openstack cloud available.

How to build images from Packer templates

Example 1: How to build an OSM box just for the VirtualBox provider:

cd packer_templates/osm
packer build -only=virtualbox-iso osm-8.0.4-amd64.json

Example 2: How to build an OSM VM with the OpenStack provider:

source openrc.sh    # This is only needed the first time
jq 'del(."post-processors")' osm-8.0.4-amd64.json > tmp.json
packer build -only=openstack tmp.json
rm tmp.json

As it can be seen, this type of build needs some additional details and commands, since:

• We need to source the OpenStack credentials, besides additional environment variables that are required to pass cloud-dependent parameters to Packer.
• We must rip the post-processors part of the template, since it is likely to be incompatible with the openstack builder. This rip can be made easily jq but, unfortunately, Packer does not work reliably with piped inputs, so we need to use an intermediate temporary file.

How to test Vagrant boxes produced by Packer

1. Import the local box into Packer:

   cd ../../builds
   vagrant box add --name osm/osm-rel8 osm-8.0.4.virtualbox.box
   

2. Use the example at vagrant_tests to test it:

   cd ../vagrant_tests/
   # Edit the box name in `Vagrantfile` as appropriate
   vagrant up
   

3. In case the local image is no longer needed, it can be removed by:

   vagrant destroy
   vagrant box remove osm/osm-rel8
   

How to upload boxes to Vagrant Cloud

You need to use the Vagrant web page.

Here there is a step-by-step guide with screenshots.