Packer Templates for Fedora

Overview

This repository contains templates for Fedora that can create Vagrant boxes using Packer.

Current Boxes

• Fedora 23 (64-bit)
• Fedora 22 (64-bit)

Building the Vagrant Boxes

To build all the boxes, you will need Packer and VirtualBox installed.

A GNU Make Makefile drives the process via the following targets:

make        # Build all the box types (VirtualBox, VMware & Parallels)
make test   # Run tests against all the boxes
make list   # Print out individual targets
make clean  # Clean up build detritus

For IDI boxes the following target should be used:

make virtualbox/fedora23

Troubleshoot Build Issues

Part of the build process involves operating system installation. In this phase Packer is unable to retrieve logs from the installation tools being used by the operating system; if an error occurs here then the build will fail without meaningful errors. At this point a virtual display can be used to monitor the installation:

HEADLESS=true make virtualbox/fedora23

Create a New Release

When a new version of Fedora is released the following files will need to be created:

• Vagrantfiles/fedora.Vagrantfile
• fedora.json
• http/ks-fedora.cfg

This README.md and the VERSION file will also need to be updated. Any Fedora releases that are no longer supported upstream should have their files pruned from this repository.

Makefile.local Overrides

You can create a Makefile.local file alongside the Makefile to override some of the default settings. The variables can that can be currently used are:

• CM
• CM_VERSION
• HEADLESS
• <iso_path>
• UPDATE

Makefile.local is most commonly used to override the default configuration management tool, for example with Chef:

# Makefile.local
CM := chef

Changing the value of the CM variable changes the target suffixes for the output of make list accordingly.

Possible values for the CM variable are:

• nocm - No configuration management tool (this should be used for IDI and GPII projects)
• chef - Install Chef
• puppet - Install Puppet
• salt - Install Salt

You can also specify a variable CM_VERSION, if supported by the configuration management tool, to override the default of latest. The value of CM_VERSION should have the form x.y or x.y.z, such as CM_VERSION := 11.12.4

The variable UPDATE can be used to perform OS patch management. The default is to not apply OS updates by default. When UPDATE := true, the latest OS updates will be applied.

The variable HEADLESS can be set to run Packer in headless mode. Set HEADLESS := true, the default is false.

The variable PACKER can be used to set the path to the packer binary. The default is packer.

The variable ISO_PATH can be used to set the path to a directory with OS install images. This override is commonly used to speed up Packer builds by pointing at pre-downloaded ISOs instead of using the default download Internet URLs.

Acknowledgments

SmartyStreets is providing basebox hosting for the box-cutter project.