packer-scripts

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Purpose:

Prepare a vagrant box based on existing Opscode vagrant base boxes, with recipes applied.

Pain Point

When authoring cookbook recipes I found myself manually making new base vagrant boxes with applied finished recipes to save the extra converge time in test kitchen (e.g., compiling ruby from scratch, operating system updates, build tools, etc). Unfortunately, but not unreasonably, Packer does not come with a built in Vagrant builder plugin. Fortuanely, the VirtualBox builder plugin is completely workable.

Solution

The included scripts will apply some recipes to a base box and spit out a re-packaged vagrant box which can be imported as a new base box for development.

Suggested Extension

This repo can easily be forked and modified to spit out a prepared AMI with your own recipes by starting with existing standard operating system AMIs, using the appropriate Packer modules. In theory, this could be integrated into your build pipeline to avoid the VPN (Virtual Private Network) bootstrap problem, although I'd suggest you still build the capability to run against a chef server.

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Usage

Pre-Requisites

• VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads)
• Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/)
• Packer (https://www.packer.io/downloads.html)

Repackaging a base vagrant box

cd vagrant
./repack.sh box-name cookbook-directory recipe

• Example

./repack.sh centos-6.5 ../../rails-box-cookbook rails-box-cookbook::default

• Notes: You can use absolute or relative paths, but the script will also check 2 directory levels below what you specify, so in the above example just using "rails-box-cookbook" will work.

Using the new prepared vagrant box

• Add the box from the vagrant-repack-working directory

cd ../../vagrant-repack-working
vagrant box add <name-for-box> <prepped.box>

• Example:

cd ../../prep-box-cookbook-working directory
vagrant box add centos-6.5-prepped opscode-centos-6.5-prepped.box

• create a ".kitchen.local.yml" and add section such as:

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-12.04
    driver:
      box: ubuntu-12.04-prepped
  - name: centos-6.5
    driver:
      box: centos-6.5-prepped

Currently Supported Base Boxes

• centos-6.5
• ubuntu-12.04

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Other

To Do List

• replace the aggressive cleanup scripts from bento with custom cleanup scripts
• possibly collapse the Packer json scripts, and workaround lack of curl on ubuntu-12.04
• zero-out space prior to packing

Credit and Thanks

• thanks to opscode

Licensing

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Steven Praski

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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