A collection of Packer Tempaltes to build "Golden images" of various OSes

All Packer templates are basked on the templates used in the Bento project by Chef Software and have been modifed for my own personal use and not intended for building Vagrant base boxes, for vagrant boxes see the templates in the [project home](https://github.com/chef/bento and the ones published on the bento org on Vagrant Cloud.

• Packer
• At least one of the following virtualization providers:
  • VirtualBox
  • VMware Fusion
  • VMware Workstation
  • Parallels Desktop also requires Parallels Virtualization SDK
  • KVM *
  • Hyper-V *

To build an Ubuntu 20.04 box for only the Vmware provider

$ cd packer_templates/ubuntu
$ packer build -only=vmware-iso ubuntu-20.04-amd64.json

To build an Ubuntu 18.04 box for only the VirtualBox provider

$ cd packer_templates/ubuntu
$ packer build -only=virtualbox-iso ubuntu-18.04-amd64.json

To build Debian 10.4 32bit boxes for all possible providers (simultaneously)

$ cd packer_templates/debian
$ packer build debian-10.4-i386.json

To build CentOS 7.7 boxes for all providers except VMware and Parallels

$ cd packer_templates/centos
$ packer build -except=parallels-iso,vmware-iso centos-7.7-x86_64.json

To use an alternate mirror

$ cd packer_templates/fedora
$ packer build -var 'mirror=http://mirror.utexas.edu/fedora/linux' fedora-31-x86_64.json

To use a designated packer cache, create a folder and set the environmental variable

$ mkdir /path/to/store/isodownload
$ PACKER_CACHE_DIR=/path/to/store/isodownload
$ cd packer_templates/fedora
$ packer build -only=vmware-iso fedora-31-x86_64.json

Configuring Packer logging

Packer depends on two environment variables being configured, PACKER_LOG and PACKER_LOG_PATH

$ export PACKER_LOG=1
$ export PACKER_LOG_PATH="packerlog.txt"
$ packer build -only=vmware-iso alpine-3.12-x86.json
$ tail -f packerlog.txt

If the build is successful, the Virtual Machine files will be in the builds directory at the root of the repository.

CENTOS, RHEL and ORACLE Linux share the same kickstart, ks.cfg, and build scripts found in the centos folder. These scripts set the hostname to newvm, so rename and adjust accordingly per build

Templates for operating systems (macOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise) that require license or subscription require you to add the correct links to the ISOs as they are not publicly available

The Packer templates expect the ISOs to be in ./packer_cache folder relative to the Packer .json file

See links below

• Packer
• Bento project by Chef Software
• Awesome projects:
• https://github.com/boxcutter
• https://github.com/mcandre/packer-templates
• https://github.com/timsutton/osx-vm-templates
• https://github.com/ferventcoder/vagrant-windows-puppet/tree/master/baseboxes
• https://github.com/mrlesmithjr/packer-templates