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Creating Vagrant Boxes with Packer

Creating Vagrant Boxes with Packer

We recommend using Packer to create boxes, as is it is fully repeatable and keeps a strong history of changes within Atlas.

Getting Started

Using Packer requires more up front effort, but the repeatable and automated builds will end any manual management of boxes. Additionally, all boxes will be stored and served from Atlas, keeping a history along the way.

Some useful Vagrant Boxes documentation will help you learn about managing Vagrant boxes in Atlas.

You can also read on to learn more about how Packer uploads and versions the boxes with post-processors.

Post-Processors

Packer uses post-processors to define how to process images and artifacts after provisioning. Both the vagrant and atlas post-processors must be used in order to upload Vagrant Boxes to Atlas via Packer.

It's important that they are sequenced in the Packer template so they run in order. This is done by nesting arrays:

"post-processors": [
  [
    {
      "type": "vagrant"
      ...
    },
    {
      "type": "atlas"
      ...
    }
  ]
]

Sequencing automatically passes the resulting artifact from one post-processor to the next – in this case, the .box file.

Vagrant Post-Processor

The Vagrant post-processor is required to package the image from the build (an .ovf file, for example) into a .box file before passing it to the atlas post-processor.

{
  "type": "vagrant",
  "keep_input_artifact": false
}

The input artifact (i.e and .ovf file) does not need to be kept when building Vagrant Boxes, as the resulting .box will contain it.

Atlas Post-Processor

The Atlas post-processor takes the resulting .box file and uploads it to Atlas, adding metadata about the box version.

{
  "type": "atlas",
  "artifact": "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/dev-environment",
  "artifact_type": "vagrant.box",
  "metadata": {
    "provider": "vmware_desktop",
    "version": "0.0.1"
  }
}

Attributes Required

These are all of the attributes for that Atlas post-processor required for uploading Vagrant Boxes. A complete example is shown below.

artifact: The username and box name (username/name) you're creating the version of the box under. If the box doesn't exist, it will be automatically created
artifact_type: This must be vagrant.box. Atlas uses this to determine how to treat this artifact.

For vagrant.box type artifacts, you can specify keys in the metadata block:

provider: The Vagrant provider for the box. Common providers are virtualbox, vmware_desktop, aws and so on (required)
version: This is the Vagrant box version and is constrained to the same formatting as in the web UI: *.*.* (optional, but required for boxes with multiple providers). The version will increment on the minor version if left blank (e.g the initial version will be set to 0.1.0, the subsequent version will be set to 0.2.0).
description: This is the desciption that will be shown with the version of the box. You can use Markdown for links and style. (optional)

Example

An example post-processor block for Atlas and Vagrant is below. In this example, the build runs on both VMware and Virtualbox creating two different providers for the same box version (0.0.1).

"post-processors": [
  [
    {
      "type": "vagrant",
      "keep_input_artifact": false
    },
    {
      "type": "atlas",
      "only": ["vmware-iso"],
      "artifact": "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/dev-environment",
      "artifact_type": "vagrant.box",
      "metadata": {
        "provider": "vmware_desktop",
        "version": "0.0.1"
      }
    },
    {
      "type": "atlas",
      "only": ["virtualbox-iso"],
      "artifact": "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/dev-environment",
      "artifact_type": "vagrant.box",
      "metadata": {
        "provider": "virtualbox",
        "version": "0.0.1"
      }
    }
  ]
]

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