Windows Packer Templates

• Introduction
  • Supported Builders
  • Supported Operating Systems
  • Pre-build Images
• Prepare your system to run Packer
  • Ubuntu
  • Windows
• Running the Build Script
  • Building Hyper-V Images
  • Building VirtualBox Images
• Using the Vagrant Images

Introduction

This repository contains build scripts to golden images using Packer.

Interested in some best practices when using Packer with Windows? Check out my blog post on the topic.

Supported Builders

The supported builds are:

• VirtualBox
• Hyper-V

Supported Operating Systems

The build.supported_os.yaml file contains the list of Operating Systems that are supported and their settings.

The supported Operating Systems to build are:

• Win2012R2Core
• Windows2012R2
• Windows2016StdCore
• Windows2016Std

Pre-build Images

If you just want to download the pre-build Vagrant images, download them from HashiCorp Atlas.

Prepare your system to run Packer

Before you can run the build scripts, you need to prepare your system.

Ubuntu

✅ Tested on Ubuntu 16.04

Mono is required to run the build script.

# Install Mono
sudo apt-get install mono-complete -y

# Give the script execute permission
chmod +x build.sh

Additionally you will need to install:

• Packer
• VirtualBox

Windows

✅ Tested on Windows 10 Pro

# Set PowerShell Execution Policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Force

# Install Chocolatey
iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex

# Install Packer
choco install packer -y

# Install Hyper-V
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All

Running the Build Script

Depending on your platform, you either need to run:

• build.ps1 on Windows
• build.sh on Linux / MacOS.

Building Hyper-V Images

The following commands will build you Hyper-V Images

# Builds Windows 2016 Standard Core and runs the Vagrant post processor (local).
.\build.ps1 -Target "hyperv-local" -os="Windows2016StdCore"

# Set your Atlas API Key
$env:ATLAS_TOKEN = "123-MYATLAS-APIKEY"

# Builds Windows 2012 R2 Core and runs the Atlas post processor.
.\build.ps1 -Target "hyperv-atlas" --os="Win2012R2Core" --atlas_username="MattHodge" --atlas_version="1.0.0"

Building VirtualBox Images

The following commands will build you VirtualBox Images

# Builds Windows 2016 Standard Core and runs the Vagrant post processor (local).
./build.sh --target "virtualbox-local" -os="Windows2016StdCore"

# Set your Atlas API Key
export ATLAS_TOKEN="123-MYATLAS-APIKEY"

# Builds Windows 2012 R2 Core and runs the Atlas post processor.
./build.sh --target "virtualbox-atlas" -os="Win2012R2Core" --atlas_username="MattHodge" --atlas_version="1.0.0"

Using the Vagrant Images

If you aren't pushing your boxes to Atlas, you can import the *.box files for use in Vagrant:

vagrant box add .\win2016stdcore-wmf5-nocm-hyperv.box --name Windows2016StdCore

You can also find all the boxes ready to be vagrant uped over at my VagrantBoxes Repository.