Packer Community Example Templates

Packer Community Templates for Windows environments to test/showcase many of the Windows-specific Builders and Provisioners.

Running

• Install Packer and Packer Community

• Clone this repo:

  git clone git@github.com:mefellows/packer-windows-templates.git && cd packer-community-templates
  

• Run Packer

  Common practice is to create intermediate boxes in machine image pipelines, such as a 'Base' and 'Application' images. The examples below follow this pattern.

  Vagrant Boxes

  Run the ISO builder to produce a simple Base box with VirtualBox guest additions and optionally Windows updates (Uncomment the relevant lines in the Autounattend.xml files to enable this):

  packer build -only=virtualbox-windows-iso 2012r2-virtualbox.json
  

  Run the OVF builder to produce a simple base box with rsync and Seek DSC resources installed:

  packer build -only=virtualbox-windows-ovf 2012r2-virtualbox.json
  

  AWS Machines

  packer build --var base_ami=ami-ac3a1cc4 --var subnet_id=subnet-1234abcd--var vpc_id=vpc-4567defg ./amazon-sysprep.json
  

Windows Updates

Use the /answer_files/2012_r2/updates/Autounattend.xml file as a replacement in the floppy_files configuration item.

Sysprep

An example unattended sysprep file is automatically uploaded to c:/Windows/Temp/Autounattend_sysprep.xml which can be used in a provisioner to sysprep the machine. For example, you may replace the default shutdown_command in the OVF builder with the following:

"shutdown_command": "c:/windows/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe /generalize /oobe /quiet /shutdown /unattend:c:/Windows/Temp/Autounattend_sysprep.xml",
"shutdown_timeout": "15m"

NOTE: This currently impacts the rsync (SSH) capability due to SIDs and such.

Credits

Thanks to Joe's joefitzgerald/packer-windows templates for the inspiration and basis for much of this work.