Harbor Packer Appliance

This is a project to develop a Packer template to have Harbor in an OVA format. Harbor deprecated the official OVA installation a while ago, but it can still be useful to have a Harbor appliance for those situations when you require a fast to deploy image registry. This project is not related to the official Harbor project and as such, it is not supported by the Harbor project maintainers.

The OVA is based around Photon OS and can be built using Packer. It is based around the work by William Lam and Timo Sugliani.

The following Packer templates will build an OVA using a VMware vSphere ESXi host (although it is easily modifiable to build from VMware Workstation or Fusion) from a Photon 4.0 image. After the creation, the VM will be customizable using OVF parameters, so network, root password and Harbor configuration will be assignable during deployment. If no network is configured during deployment, it will use DHCP.

Requirements

A Linux or Mac environment (to be able to run the shell-local provisioner)
A VMware ESXi host to use as builder prepared for Packer using this guide
A DHCP-enabled network.
Packer 1.6.6
OVFTool installed and configured in your PATH.

Building

To build this template, you will need to edit the harbor-appliance-builder.json file with your ESXi values:

{
  "builder_host": "packerbuild.sclab.local",
  "builder_host_username": "root",
  "builder_host_password": "VMware1!",
  "builder_host_datastore": "datastore1",
  "builder_host_portgroup": "VM Network"
}

The Harbor version can be modified in the harbor-version.json

{
  "harbor_version": "v2.5.1"
}

Then run the build-harbor-appliance.sh script or execute the following commands:

rm -f output-vmware-iso/*

packer build -var-file=harbor-appliance-builder.json -var-file=harbor-version.json -var-file=harbor-appliance-version.json harbor-appliance.json

Deployment parameters

The following network parameters can be configured when deploying the OVA in vSphere:

Value	Description	Default value
Hostname	Hostname for the VM.	harbor
IP Address	IP address of the VM	(DHCP)
Netmask Prefix	Netmask in CIDR notation	(DHCP)
Gateway	Gateway of the VM	(DHCP)
DNS	DNS Server of the VM	(DHCP)
DNS Domain	DNS Domain of the VM	(DHCP)

The password for the root user must be configured on deployment:

Value	Description	Default value
Root Password	Password to log into the system as root user	Mandatory value

The following Harbor configuration parameters can be set during deployment:

Value	Description	Default value
Harbor Hostname	FQDN for Harbor	Mandatory value
Harbor Data Volume size	Size of the volume in GB	60 GB
Harbor HTTPS certificate	HTTPS certificate in PEM format	Auto generated certificate
Harbor HTTPS certificate Private Key	Private key for the certificate in PEM format	Auto generated certificate
Harbor admin password	Harbor admin password	Harbor12345
Harbor database password	Harbor integrated PostgreSQL password	root123
Harbor HTTP Proxy (optional)	HTTP Proxy for Harbor
Harbor HTTPS Proxy (optional)	HTTPS proxy for Harbor
Harbor No Proxy (optional)	Locations to exclude from Harbor HTTP and HTTPS_PROXY
Additional TLS cert (optional)	Additional TLS certificate to add to the OS

An additional flag can be configured for virtual machine deployment debugging:

Value	Description	Default value
Debug	Enables logging to /var/log/photon-customization-debug.log	False

HTTPS certificates

HTTPS certificates can be configured during the deployment process in the Harbor HTTPS certificate and Harbor HTTPS certificate private key fields. Both the certificate and private key must be in PEM format. If no certificate is provided, it will be generated and self-signed during the first boot. Those certificates and the CA can be found under the /root/certs folder.

Acknowledgements

This project is possible because of the great work done by the Harbor project maintainers. Also, a big thank you to the packer-vsphere-debian-appliances project by Timo Sugliani and photonos-nfs-appliance project

rguske / harbor-packer-appliance