Packer Example - CentOS 7 minimal Vagrant Box using Ansible provisioner

Current CentOS Version Used: 7.2

This example build configuration installs and configures CentOS 7 x86_64 minimal using Ansible, and then generates three Vagrant box files, for:

• VirtualBox
• VMware
• Amazon-EBS

The example can be modified to use more Ansible roles, plays, and included playbooks to fully configure (or partially) configure a box file suitable for deployment for development environments.

Requirements

The following software must be installed/present on your local machine before you can use Packer to build the Vagrant box file:

• Packer
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox (if you want to build the VirtualBox box)
• VMware Fusion (or Workstation - if you want to build the VMware box)
• Ansible

You will also need some Ansible roles installed so they can be used in the building of the VM. To install the roles:

1. Run $ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.txt in this directory.
2. If your local Ansible roles path is not the default (/etc/ansible/roles), update the role_paths inside centos7.json to match your custom location.

If you don't have Ansible installed (perhaps you're using a Windows PC?), you can simply clone the required Ansible roles from GitHub directly (use Ansible Galaxy to get the GitHub repository URLs for each role listed in requirements.txt), and update the role_paths variable to match the location of the cloned role.

Usage

Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed, then cd to the directory containing this README.md file, and run:

$ packer build -var 'aws_access_key=YOUR ACCESS KEY' -var 'aws_secret_key=YOUR SECRET KEY'  centos7.json 

After a few minutes, Packer should tell you the box was generated successfully.

If you want to only build a box for one of the supported virtualization platforms (e.g. only build the VMware box), add --only=vmware-iso to the packer build command:

$ packer build --only=vmware-iso centos7.json

Vagrant Amazon-EBS Box Configuration

1. Add newly created box to vagrant.

   $ vagrant box add /path/to/aws-centos7.box --name aws-centos7

2. In your vagrant project directory you must install vagrant aws plugin. See https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws

   $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws

3. Configure a Vagrantfile like one below. See https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  
  config.vm.box = "aws-centos7"

  # After issuing vagrant up command rsync will update from local folder to destination folder.
  config.vm.synced_folder "synced-folder/", "/synced-folder", type: "rsync"

  config.ssh.pty = true


  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    
    aws.access_key_id = "ID"
    aws.secret_access_key = "SECRET"

    # This is the private AMI ID created by packer
    aws.ami = "ami-12345678"

    aws.instance_type = "t2.micro"
    
    # Assign ec2 instance a security group with port 22 open. 
    aws.security_groups = "SSH-open"

    # NFS will not work for remote instance
    override.nfs.functional = false

  end
end

4. After installing vagrant aws plugin to Vagrant project folder run

   $ vagrant up --provider=aws

License

MIT license.

Authors Information

Created in 2014 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.

Amazon-EBS Vagrant box build created in 2016 by Peter Mika