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Packer templates for Ubuntu written in legacy JSON

Overview

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

Development Versioning Information

Please see the files under development-environments for published combinations used during the development and testing of patches for this repository.

Current Boxes

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

Building the Vagrant boxes with Packer

We make use of HCL files containing user variables to build specific versions of Ubuntu. 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 ubuntu.json packer template, which builds Ubuntu 20.04 by default.

The general form for the packer build command is:

    packer build \
        [-only=<template-type>] \
        [-var-file=ubuntu-add-desktop.pkvars.hcl] \
        -var-file=ubuntu{release}.pkvars.hcl \
        -var="version={yyyymmdd-n}" \
        build-ubuntu

The boxcutter templates currently support the following desktop virtualization (template-type above) strings:

  • parallels-iso.ubuntu - Parallels desktop virtualization (Requires the Pro Edition - Desktop edition won't work)
  • virtualbox-iso.ubuntu - VirtualBox desktop virtualization
  • vmware-iso.ubuntu - VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation desktop virtualization

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

If no single template type is specified the builder will attempt to build out all the desktop virtualization products listed above and will fail if those applications have not been installed.

Variable overrides

There are two files the define the variables that the user is permitted (but not enforced) to change at the packer command-line.

  • build-ubuntu/vars-interactive.pkr.hcl
  • build-ubuntu/vars-vm-default.pkr.hcl

A third file should be referenced if the virtual machine will require a network proxy.

  • build-ubuntu/vars-proxy.pkr.hcl

The only required variable, as noted above, is "version".

The variables representing the primary non-root user and its password are presently local variables due to the http/user-data file being a non-template with those values hard-coded.

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.

  • http_proxy
  • https_proxy
  • ftp_proxy
  • rsync_proxy
  • no_proxy

Tests

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

vagrant plugin install vagrant-serverspec

Contributing

  1. Fork and clone the repo.
  2. Create a new branch, please don't work in your master branch directly.
  3. Add new Serverspec or Bats tests in the test/ subtree for the change you want to make. Run make test on a relevant template to see the tests fail (like make test-virtualbox/ubuntu2004).
  4. Fix stuff. Use make ssh to interactively test your box (like make ssh-virtualbox/ubuntu2004).
  5. Run make test on a relevant template (like make test-virtualbox/ubuntu2004) to see if the tests pass. Repeat steps 3-5 until done.
  6. Update README.md and AUTHORS to reflect any changes.
  7. If you have a large change in mind, it is still preferred that you split them into small commits. Good commit messages are important. The git documentatproject has some nice guidelines on writing descriptive commit messages.
  8. Push to your fork and submit a pull request.
  9. Once submitted, a full make test run will be performed against your change in the build farm. You will be notified if the test suite fails.

Would you like to help out more?

Contact [email protected]

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!