Midas' Cattle Factory

This project contains the Packer build configurations for all golden calf VM images used at Currenthost.

Each box builds a minimal base box for use with VirtualBox.

Requirements

The following software must be installed/present on your local machine before you can use Packer to build any of these Vagrant boxes:

• Packer
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox
• Ansible

Usage

Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed, then cd into one of the box directories and run:

$ packer build -var 'version=1.2.0' box-config.json

After a few minutes, Packer should tell you the box was generated successfully, and the box was uploaded to Vagrant Cloud.

Note: This configuration includes a post-processor that pushes the built box to Vagrant Cloud (which requires a VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable to be set); remove the vagrant-cloud post-processor from the Packer template to build the box locally and not push it to Vagrant Cloud. You don't need to specify a version variable either, if not using the vagrant-cloud post-processor.

Building all the boxes

Whenever VirtualBox is updated, it's best to re-build all the base boxes, so they have the latest guest additions.

Assuming you have Ansible and Packer installed already, and you have a VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN available in your environment, you can run the playbook to build and push updated versions for all the boxes:

ansible-playbook build-boxes.yml

You can also build and push just one box:

ansible-playbook build-boxes.yml -e "{'boxes':['debian11']}"

Testing built boxes

There's an included Vagrantfile that allows quick testing of the built Vagrant boxes. From the same box directory, run the following command after building the box:

$ vagrant up

Test that the box works correctly, then tear it down with:

$ vagrant destroy -f

License

MIT

Credit

Most of the credit for this repo must go to Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps. We extend the golden hand of gratitude for all your work.