packer-builder-vagrant

packer-builder-vagrant

Proxy builder. It fetches vagrant box (if it is not yet fetched) and forwards the actual building to the corresponding builder.

WARNING It essentially compiles in the whole packer to allow us to configure any builder plugin. This means you need to match packer version exactly.

Brief

Packer allows to package existing boxes and save results as vagrant boxes. The problem is that all builders expect you to provide absolute path to box file under source_path e.g.:

{
  "type": "virtualbox-ovf",
  "source_path": "path/to/source.ovf",
  "ssh_username": "packer",
  "ssh_password": "packer",
  "shutdown_command": "echo 'packer' | sudo -S shutdown -P now"
}

This is not convenient if you think about it. Won't it be nice for packer to automagically find existing vagrant box, provision it and build a new version right away?

packer-builder-vagrant does exactly that. It works as a proxy and finds existing vagrant boxes before starting the underlying actual builder with the updated configuration.

Installation

Pre-built binaries

The easiest way to install this post-processor is to download a pre-built binary from release page. Download the correct binary for your platform and place it in one of the following places:

• The directory where packer is, or the executable directory.
• ~/.packer.d/plugins on Unix systems or %APPDATA%/packer.d/plugins on Windows.
• The current working directory.

Don't forget to strip off os and arch information from the executable i.e:

$ mkdir -p ~/.packer.d/plugins
$ cp packer-0.12.0_packer-builder-vagrant_linux_amd64 ~/.packer.d/plugins/packer-builder-vagrant

See docs for more info.

Usage

You can convert your existing configuration in the following way to enable automatic vagrant boxes discovery:

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "virtualbox-ovf",
      "source_path": "/home/john.doe/.vagrant.d/boxes/bento-VAGRANTSLASH-centos-7.3/2.3.5/virtualbox/box.ovf",
      "guest_additions_mode": "disable",
      "headless": true,
      "ssh_username": "vagrant",
      "ssh_password": "vagrant",
      "ssh_pty": true,
      "ssh_private_key_file": "key/vagrant",
      "shutdown_command": "echo '/sbin/halt -h -p' > /tmp/shutdown.sh; echo 'vagrant'|sudo -S sh '/tmp/shutdown.sh'"
    }
  ],
  ...
}

Wrap virtualbox-ovf in vagrant builder the following way:

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "vagrant",

      "box_name": "bento/centos-7.3",
      "box_provider": "virtualbox",
      "box_file": ".ovf",

      "builder": {
        "type": "virtualbox-ovf",
        "guest_additions_mode": "disable",
        "headless": true,
        "ssh_username": "vagrant",
        "ssh_password": "vagrant",
        "ssh_pty": true,
        "ssh_private_key_file": "key/vagrant",
        "shutdown_command": "echo '/sbin/halt -h -p' > /tmp/shutdown.sh; echo 'vagrant'|sudo -S sh '/tmp/shutdown.sh'"
      }
    }
  ],
  ...
}

Note that config key contains full configuration for virtualbox-ovf builder except source_path. vagrant builder will find a locally cached file for this specified box and automatically add source_path key to the virtualbox-ovf configuration.

Configuration

All configuration properties are required, except where noted.

box_name

The name of the box to use.

box_version (optional)

Box version to find. It uses most recent version available by default.

box_provider

Provider to find box for e.g.:

• virtualbox
• vmware_desktop
• ...

box_file

Box file to look for in the box directory. This file will provided in source_path to the underlying builder. Different boxes have different file names so it is a regexp pattern that must match only one file in the directory.

builder

Here you should provide configuration for the actual builder to be used. source_path will be automatically populated by box discovery. Note that you can always explicitly define source_path for test purposes. In this case source_path won't be changed.

Troubleshooting

Note that this plugin does very little. It simply generates a proper source_path value and hands over control to the packer itself. This means you can always run exactly the same template without this plugin by simply providing source_path explicitly.

• You need to verify that vagrant is working.
• You need to verify that packer is working by running your template without this plugin.
• You need to make sure that plugin is compiled for your packer version.

Only then you should start blaming this plugin for not working. The easiest way is to clone this repo and run tests I use myself to verify everything is still kind of OK:

$ git clone https://github.com/themalkolm/packer-builder-vagrant.git
$ cd packer-builder-vagrant
$ cd test/virtualbox
$ ./test.sh
...
OK