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Packer templates for Fedora written in legacy JSON

Overview

This repository contains Packer templates for creating Fedora Vagrant boxes written in legacy JSON.

Current Boxes

We no longer provide pre-built binaries for these templates.

Building the Vagrant boxes with Packer

To build all the boxes, you will need VirtualBox, VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation and Parallels installed.

Parallels requires that the Parallels Virtualization SDK for Mac be installed as an additional prerequisite.

We make use of JSON files containing user variables to build specific versions of Fedora. You tell packer to use a specific user variable file via the -var-file= command line option. This will override the default options on the core fedora.json packer template, which builds Fedora 25 by default.

For example, to build Fedora 28 Server, use the following:

$ packer build -var-file=fedora28-server.json fedora.json

If you want to make boxes for a specific desktop virtualization platform, use the -only parameter. For example, to build Fedora 28 Server for VirtualBox:

$ packer build -only=virtualbox-iso -var-file=fedora28-server.json fedora.json

The boxcutter templates currently support the following desktop virtualization strings:

Building the Vagrant boxes with the box script

We've also provided a wrapper script bin/box for ease of use, so alternatively, you can use the following to build Fedora 28 for all providers:

$ bin/box build fedora28

Or if you just want to build Fedora 28 for VirtualBox:

$ bin/box build fedora28 virtualbox

Building the Vagrant boxes with the Makefile

A GNU Make Makefile drives a complete basebox creation pipeline with the following stages:

  • build - Create basebox *.box files
  • assure - Verify that the basebox *.box files produced function correctly
  • deliver - Upload *.box files to Artifactory, Atlas or an S3 bucket

The pipeline is driven via the following targets, making it easy for you to include them in your favourite CI tool:

make build   # Build all available box types
make assure  # Run tests against all the boxes
make deliver # Upload box artifacts to a repository
make clean   # Clean up build detritus

Proxy Settings

The templates respect the following network proxy environment variables and forward them on to the virtual machine environment during the box creation process, should you be using a proxy:

  • http_proxy
  • https_proxy
  • ftp_proxy
  • rsync_proxy
  • no_proxy

Tests

The tests are written in Serverspec and require the vagrant-serverspec plugin to be installed with:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-serverspec

The Makefile has individual targets for each box type with the prefix test-* should you wish to run tests individually for each box.

make test-virtualbox/fedora22

Similarly there are targets with the prefix ssh-* for registering a newly-built box with vagrant and for logging in using just one command to do exploratory testing. For example, to do exploratory testing on the VirtualBox training environment, run the following command:

make ssh-virtualbox/fedora22

Upon logout make ssh-* will automatically de-register the box as well.

Makefile.local override

You can create a Makefile.local file alongside the Makefile to override some of the default settings. The variables can that can be currently used are:

  • CM
  • CM_VERSION
  • HEADLESS
  • <iso_path>
  • UPDATE

Makefile.local is most commonly used to override the default configuration management tool, for example with Chef:

# Makefile.local
CM := chef

Changing the value of the CM variable changes the target suffixes for the output of make list accordingly.

Possible values for the CM variable are:

  • nocm - No configuration management tool
  • chef - Install Chef
  • puppet - Install Puppet
  • salt - Install Salt

You can also specify a variable CM_VERSION, if supported by the configuration management tool, to override the default of latest. The value of CM_VERSION should have the form x.y or x.y.z, such as CM_VERSION := 11.12.4

The variable UPDATE can be used to perform OS patch management. The default is to not apply OS updates by default. When UPDATE := true, the latest OS updates will be applied.

The variable HEADLESS can be set to run Packer in headless mode. Set HEADLESS := true, the default is false.

The variable PACKER can be used to set the path to the packer binary. The default is packer.

The variable ISO_PATH can be used to set the path to a directory with OS install images. This override is commonly used to speed up Packer builds by pointing at pre-downloaded ISOs instead of using the default download Internet URLs.

Acknowledgments

Parallels provided a Business Edition license of their software to run on the basebox build farm.

SmartyStreets provided basebox hosting for the box-cutter project since 2015 - thank you for your support!