Packer By Example

This repository documents working examples of packer building VM images for various applications.

The stucture of the examples are;

./<cloud provider>/<operating system>/<main provisioner>/<application>

For example, NGINX running on Centos 7, installed via ansible-local, for Google Cloud would be found at;

./gcp/centos-7/ansible-remote/nginx

Popular Examples

• aws/centos-8/ansible-local/soe
• azure/windows-server-2016/ansible-remote/soe
• azure/centos-8/ansible-local/apache
• gcp/centos-8/ansible-local/soe

Github Actions

• Runs packer validate -syntax-only

Acceptance criteria

• Configuration must be abstracted into env args or variables.pkr.hcl
• Running packer build . in a packer working directory should complete sucessfully.
• Packer file must be named packer.pkr.hcl
• Variables file must be named variables.pkr.hcl
• Packer files must be in HCL format.
• All directories and file names should be lower case.
• Credentials must be passed as well known env vars, nothing statically configured.

Other notes

• The acceptance tests whitelists the name of the cloud providers, operating systems and provisioners.

File extensions

Extension	Description
.pkr.hcl	Packer file in HCL
.sh	Shell script
.ps1	Windows Powershell
.yaml	Any yaml file (not .yml)

Well known directories and file names

Directory	Description
README.md	Readme for this packer build directory only.
packer.pkr.hcl	Packer build file
variables.pkr.hcl	All configuration should be set with environement variables as the default value. e.g. env("foo")
./ansible	Working directory for Ansible, including roles, dependancies etc.
./scripts	Contains any scripts needed for build, e.g. Cloud-init, shell, bash, powershell