Packer

Packer

On this page you will find some resources to help you get to grips with HashiCorp Packer.

I first started using Packer in anger during the great pandemic of 2020. In fact, it was a renewed desire to learn, develop myself and my homelab that put me on to Packer finally. (Kudos to Mark for being my motivational support Hobbit in this regard.) It was also the catalyst that drove me to launch this blog.

On to business...

GitHub Repositories

I've created a number of different git repositories related to Packer. Partly this is due to how my knowledge and experience has evolved, but also down to how I've come to treat my templates in my homelab. Each one is a separate "product" and hence has it's own repository. Yes that does result in some duplication of scripts etc, but it also means that each can be developed and managed by itself.

Update 03/03/2021: I've consolidated all of my Packer builds in to a single repository now. They've all been converted to HCL from JSON as well. The overall process that I use is fairly similar. I'll archive all of my other repos in the coming weeks.

Packer Repository for vSphere Builds

This is the consolidated repository I'll be using from this point forwards. It currently contains templates for Windows Server 2019 Std, CentOS 7 & 8, Photon 4, Windows Server 2016 Std, Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.

v12n-io/packer
v12n consolidated Packer repository for vSphere. Contribute to v12n-io/packer development by creating an account on GitHub.

Articles

I've created a number of articles over the course of the last year. That includes a series where I worked through building up some of my template files. They're all tagged with "Packer".

Packer - v12n.io
Why do something twice when you can automate it? Scripting, orchestrating and automating clouds and virtualisation platforms since 2008.

Videos

I haven't done much on the video front recently, but this video showcases an automated build process that I created by combining Packer and VMware Code Stream.

Docker Images

Finally, in the video above my Code Stream pipeline uses a Docker image with Packer built-in that I made. If you want that, it's right here.

Docker Hub