Current Ubuntu Version Used: 14.04.1 (Not using the latest kernel due to this bug)
This example build configuration installs and configures Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 minimal using Ansible, and then generates two Vagrant box files, for:
- VirtualBox
- VMware
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.
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:
- Run
$ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.txtin this directory. - If your local Ansible roles path is not the default (
/etc/ansible/roles), update therole_pathsinsideubuntu1404.jsonto 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.
Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed, then cd to the directory containing this README.md file, and run:
$ packer build ubuntu1404.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 ubuntu1404.json
MIT license.
Created in 2014 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.