Build vagrant baseboxes using packer

Currently supported

• Debian Jessie
• qemu, virtualbox and lxc

Customization

• puppet, facter are pre-installed
• Permit root ssh login with password vagrant

Building locally

This example builds only for the qemu provider.

packer build -only=qemu jessie.json

Connect to VNC

While building you can connect to the box using

vncviewer -Shared localhost:PORT

just make sure to provide the PORT shown on the console shown like this:

==> qemu: Found available VNC port: 5922

LXC

To build a lxc box, install https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc first

You need to run packer with sudo:

sudo -E packer build -only=lxc jessie.json

Cache dir is at /var/lib/lxc/packer-lxc/rootfs.

Issues

not enough space in /tmp

The vagrant post-processor uses /tmp as default temp dir, and needs ~10gb of diskspace, otherwise it will fail like this:

Post-processor failed: write /tmp/packer845144867/box.img: no space left on device

You can circumvent this problem exporting this variable before building:

export PACKER_TMP=.

BUT you need to build packer itself from source because this variable isn't read by the latest packer available as package (0.8.6). I only got latest packer HEAD compiled after a dirty hack i documented here.

Atlas post-processors fail without Atlas API token

You need to remove both atlas post-processors in the jessie.json file if you have not configured any Atlas API token.