Packer Example - Debian 9 minimal Vagrant Box

Current Debian Version Used: 9.4.0

Pre-built Vagrant Box:

vagrant init geerlingguy/debian9

This example build configuration installs and configures Debian 9 amd64 minimal using Ansible, and then generates a Vagrant box file for VirtualBox.

The example can be modified to use more Ansible roles, plays, and included playbooks to fully configure (or partially) configure a box file suitable for deployment for development environments.

Requirements

The following software must be installed/present on your local machine before you can use Packer to build the Vagrant box file:

Packer
Vagrant
VirtualBox (if you want to build the VirtualBox box)
Ansible

Usage

Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed, then cd to the directory containing this README.md file, and run:

$ packer build -var 'version=1.2.0' debian9.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.

Testing built boxes

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

$ vagrant up

License

MIT license.

Author Information