从预下载的无业游民框创建Packer映像

Question

I downloaded a Ubuntu 64 Trust vagrant box for vagrant and fired it up and it works fine.

vagrant box add /local/path/to/downloaded/box.box
vagrant init
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

I made sure to use a script to update the system, create users, enable port forwarding, generate ssh keys, install dependencies etc. upon startup from the Vagrant file itself. It also copies a flask and postgres web app from my local environment into the vagrant machine to be run on apache, and it all works fine. finally packed the box manually using:

vagrant package --base box-name

Only then did I learn about Packer. (face palm)

I learnt that you can automate this whole process. So right now, I have my flask and Postgres web app, and a pre-downloaded vagrant box. I have gone through the documentation and I'm fairly comfortable with writing the packer templates, provisioning them, setting up builders etc. It's marvelous.

But all the examples and docs have to do with downloading the Ubuntu ISO, configuring it according to the template, and converting it into a platform deployable image for either Amazon, Digital Ocean, Google, azure etc etc and to finally use a post-process to turn it into a vagrant box.

They don't talk about using a pre downloaded vagrant box to do the same. My question is, if it is possible to use a pre downloaded vagrant box along with packer to create a machine image for platforms that are supported by amazon, azure etc?

If so, how may I go about it?

Answer 1

You cannot take an existing vagrant box as an input for a packer builder. Along the new versions packer has added a lot of new builder so you can build a new packer image from existing virtual VM , for amazon you can have input as existing EBS drive , existing amazon instance , or amazon chroot etc etc .. you should check the packer builder doc

Answer 2

As mentioned by Frédéric, it is possible to use the virtualbox-ovf/vmware-vmx builders to take an existing VM as input to Packer, run provisioning and then output a new box. For your use case, you can use one of these builders and set the source_path variable to the ovf/vmx file associated with the box you want to start from.

For example, if you added the official Ubuntu Trusty box using:

vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64

you should end up with an ovf file that you can use in your virtualbox-ovf builder's source_path variable at the following location:

$HOME/.vagrant.d/boxes/ubuntu-VAGRANTSLASH-trusty64/20160908.0.0/virtualbox/box.ovf

Notes:

• We use the above process with the vmware-vmx builder, but I haven't tested using the virtualbox-ovf builder. My understanding is that they work similarly.
• The above example is using the official box from Atlas, but you should be able to find a similar directory structure under ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/ for any local boxes you have already downloaded
• The path to the ovf will change when new boxes are released, but it shouldn't be difficult to script or manually update the path to the new version as needed.