I created this project to help me build a master Operating System image for my lab, running on Parallels Desktop and provisionable with Vagrant. The build runs entirely on Parallels and at the end creates a BOX file deployable with Vagrant
At the moment the config is ready to build a Debian Bookworm image with arm64 architecture, my base lab is a Mac Mini M2 Pro
Before start build you need to install Packer; in my case I used the official docs that use Homebrew on MacOS link
You also need Parallels Desktop Pro installed and already configured link. At the moment I'm not sure that is possible to use Parallels Desktop Standard for using the Packer provider
Next you need to install some plugins, that are included on 'require.pkr.hcl' file. After cloning the project, this is done changing dir to linux/debian and running the command
packer init .this will install all plugins included in the file
You also need to create a new HCL file containing all the 'sensitive' variables needed, you can duplicate the file sensitive.pkr.hcl.tmpl to .sensitive.pkr.hcl (if you use this name this is alredy on .gitignore).
Before launch the build I suggest you to check all the files, and tune the config according to your needs, for example you need to modify the variable for the Vagrant box output dir "box_output_dir", in debian.auto.pkr.hcl because it point to my home folder on Macos. Also maybe you need to modify the timezone, keyboard, language etc., the names of the variables are in most cases descriptive
From the directory of HCL files launch the validate to verify the build and the files:
packer validate .If the validate is successfull you can launch the build with:
packer build .The build starts and you can find the box created in the folder you specified as 'box_output_dir' if end correctly.
After modifications to the files I reccomend to launch the command to format and lint the output files
packer fmt .This project is written keeping in mind my necessities so I reccomend you to check all the passages I implemented before launch. For example I use a customized preseed file, cloud-init installation and configuration, Parallels Tools installation. Also it's structured to permit multiple dynamic build, with disk variants and os distributions.
Feel free to open issues or requests if you find bugs or feature lack
- Multi architecture builds
- Ubuntu images
- Windows images
- Gitlab Pipeline
