Building Debian 8.7 image for Qemu with Packer

Packer is a VM builder. Recipe are in debian8.json.

Requirements

# install some stuff
$ apt-get install tmux git unzip curl bridge-utils

# install packer (image builder)
$ curl -Ls -o /tmp/packer.zip https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/0.12.3/packer_0.12.3_linux_amd64.zip
$ cd /tmp && unzip /tmp/packer.zip
$ mv packer /usr/local/bin/packer

# install virsh (qemu cli)
$ apt-get install libvirt

# install qemu !
$ apt-get install qemu-system

# create a bridge to connect virtual machines to each other

Please add your own ssh public keys to .authorized_keys2.

Build

$ git clone git@github.com:samber/packer-qemu-debian
$ cd packer-qemu-debian

# Needed to shut-up X11 errors on remote servers
$ export DISPLAY=0
# Failing after a 15 minutes build, without displaying any errors, is pretty annoying !
$ export PACKER_LOG=1

# tmux for long running stuff on remote servers !
$ tmux new
[tmux] $ packer build debian8.json
#
#       { some logs }
#
[tmux] $ ls

Starting a debian virtual machine

RTFM:

$ virsh --help