Packer Debian (latest)) Template for Proxmox

Packer configuration for creating Debian virtual machine templates for Proxmox VE. Inspired by, and based upon the work started by, Roman Tomjak

Requirements

Minimum background information

Launching a virtual machine requires an operating system to be installed. VM installation is usually done using an ISO image file and depending on the OS, this can be a time consuming task one might want to avoid. Luckily, this can be automated using a process known as preseeding.

Preseeding provides a way to answer questions asked during the installation process, without having to manually enter the answers while the installation is running. You can check out the configuration for a standard Debian 10 installation in preseed.cfg and read more about this method in the preseed documentation.

Proxmox Templates provide an easy way to deploy many VMs of the same type, but naturally we don't want them to be completely identical. They may need a different hostname, an IP address, etc. This is what cloud-init takes care of.

Cloud-init is used for initial machine configuration like creating users or preseeding authorized_keys file for SSH authentication. You can check out the configuration in cloud.cfg and read more about this in cloud-init documentation.

Creating a new VM Template

Templates are created by converting an existing VM to a template. As soon as the VM is converted, it cannot be started anymore. If you want to modify an existing template, you need to create a new template.

Here's how:

Variables from the debian.source.pkr.hcl can be overridden like so:

$ packer init
$ packer build -var "proxmox_host=10.100.150.10:8006" "proxmox_api_user=<<NOTAREALUSER>>" "proxmox_api_password=<<NOTAREALPASSWORD>>" .

or you can just as easily specify a file that contains the variables and multiple files as well:

$ packer init
$ packer build -var-file vars/debian.pkrvars.hcl -var-file vars.pkrvars.hcl.sample .

Be sure to adjust this code as necessary for your setup and to make sure NOT to commit the .pkrvars.hcl file that contains your credentials to your git repository.

Deploy a VM from a Template

Right-click the template in Proxmox VE, and select "Clone".

full clone is a complete copy and is fully independent from the original VM or VM Template, but it requires the same disk space as the original
linked clone requires less disk space but cannot run without access to the base VM Template. Not supported with LVM & ISCSI storage types

Contributing

You can contribute in many ways and not just by changing the code! If you have any ideas, just open an issue and tell me what you think.

Contributing code-wise - please fork the repository and submit a pull request.

License

MIT

aracloud / packer-template-debian-12