Packer Recipe for a Docker-Capable Amazon EC2 AMI

This is a very minimal AMI that has Docker installed, on Ubuntu (HVM).

It uses the official Ubuntu Docker (lxc-docker) packages.

Usage

This is a Packer template. Install the latest version of Packer, then:

packer build \
  -var docker_version=1.6.2 \
  -var source_ami=ami-d05e75b8 \
  -var aws_region=$AWS_REGION \
  -var aws_access_key=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID \
  -var aws_secret_key=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY \
  docker-ami.json

For VPC:

packer build \
  -var docker_version=1.6.2 \
  -var source_ami=ami-<id> \
  -var instance_type=m3.medium \
  -var aws_region=$AWS_REGION \
  -var aws_access_key=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID \
  -var aws_secret_key=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY \
  -var vpc_id=vpc-<id> \
  -var subnet_id=subnet-<id> \
  docker-ami-vpc.json

This will chew for a bit and finally output the AMI ID.