This repository will contain the packer templates required to build and harden an AWS AMI
For this example I will be following steps required to run the installation and configuration of Packer on a Linux machine This setup can be done on your local workstation.
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.5.6/packer_1.5.6_linux_amd64.zip -O packer.zip
Now unzip the packer executable and copy it to your $PATH so that you can run packer commands from anywhere on the cli
unzip packer.zip
sudo mv packer /usr/bin/
That is all the steps required to setup packer. To test the setup run the following command
packer --help
Packer plugins can be installed two ways
- By simply downloading the plugin binary and placing it in the path
- Cloning the repository of the plugin, building it locally, and then storing it in the path
The first method is very straigth-forward similar to how we installed packer.
To do it using the second method, we would need to install go (version >= 1.11) on our local workstations.
# Find the version available
$ sudo apt list -a golang-go
Listing... Done
golang-go/focal,now 2:1.13~1ubuntu2 amd64
$ sudo apt-get install -y golang-go==2:1.13~1ubuntu2
To download the plugin, clone the git repo
git clone https://github.com/SwampDragons/packer-provisioner-comment.git
Then move to the new folder
cd packer-provisioner-comment/
go mod download
go build
Now that the plugin binary has been created, we need to decide how we make the plugin available. We can either copy it to the
global $PATH for all users, or put it in ~/.packer.d/plugins path to make it available for your user only.
mkdir ~/.packer.d/plugins
Note that plugins must by named in the packer-type-name format — in this case, packer-provisioner-comment
mv main ~/.packer.d/plugins/packer-provision-comment