IMG-AC

(Images as code)

Image creation harness for Qemu based virtual environments.

Cloud-init will handle the following (and is therefore, not managed here):

• DNS
• IP assignment
• Hostname
• Password
• Authorized keys
• Timezone
• NTP
• Additional users

Basic usage

1. Ensure you have the required base dependencies:

   • python3
   • packer
   • GNU make
   • Qemu

2. (optional) Create ./vehost.pkr.hcl:

   Create a valid null source with a valid SSH communicator configuration and the label vehost.

   This can be any remote machine that you would like to transfer the image to, although the purpose is for a virtual machine host.

   See docs for information on the Packer SSH communicator.

   source "null" "vehost" {
       ssh_host = "127.0.0.1"
       ssh_username = "foo"
       ssh_password = "bar" # if you want to use SSH keys, use `ssh_private_key_file` instead
   }
   

3. Use make <all|BUILD_NAME> to build, it injects a newly generated ssh key into the build process via the variables ssh_public_key and ssh_private_key_file_path, therefore you may skip this and specify your own key using the same variables.

   make <all|BUILD_NAME>
   

   If you would like to skip automatically trying to upload to a virtual environment after image creation, set VE_UPLOAD=0 to your make command or set it as an environment variable.

   make VE_UPLOAD=0 <all|BUILD_NAME>
   

Uploading previously built images to a virtual environment

1. Ensure the image is built and present at out/<target>/packer-base
2. Upload the image with make. IMG-AC will go through every build name present in the makefile and try to upload to your vehost source.

   make upload
   

Update python virtual environment

make -B .venv

Configuration

• *.auto.pkrvars.hcl may override local_vm_settings or proxmox_settings variables with your own values.
• vehost.pkr.hcl required configuration for post-build tasks, you must specify a valid SSH connection to the VE platform specified in config/config.mak. You may leave blank if you don't care about post-build tasks (use build_only=1 in your make).
• config/

config/

• config.mak required configuration, build_only, platform_ve, ansible_groups.
• ansible/
  • requirements.yaml optional ansible-galaxy requirements file ran before provisioning.
  • site.yaml shared playbook for all images, target the images differently with the groups you specify in config.mak.

Optimization

• Packer will automatically cache downloaded images on your machine
• Make will not rebuild images if they are unnecessary
• Make will only update your python virtual environment if it is out of date