Packer Operations

Internal

• Packer

Build an Amazon EC2 AMI

Credentials

Amazon credentials can be provided in the template (not recommended) or as environment variables in the context packer is executed:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="anaccesskey"
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="asecretkey"
$ export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-west-2"

or in ~/.aws/credentials file. To specify a specific profile in the file, set "AWS_PROFILE" environment variable or use insert this in the template, in the corresponding builder block:

{
  "profile": "customprofile",
  ...
}

then

packer build ...

Build

packer build [-machine-readable] <template-name>.json

Debug

-debug

Public Subnet Considerations

Unless specified otherwise, Packer will attempt to connect to the default VPC and will need a public subnet to start its temporary EC2 instance. If the subnet is not public, Packer will not be able to connect with SSH:

1593707769,,ui,say,==> infra-worker: Waiting for instance (i-99999999999999999) to become ready...
1593707787,,ui,say,==> infra-worker: Using ssh communicator to connect: 1.2.3.4
1593707787,,ui,say,==> infra-worker: Waiting for SSH to become available...
1593708087,,ui,error,==> infra-worker: Timeout waiting for SSH.
1593708087,,ui,say,==> infra-worker: Terminating the source AWS instance...

Pre-defined Public IP Address Considerations

There are situations when the Packer VM needs to reach out to a repository that whitelist addresses. In this case, we need determinism in associating the public IP address to the Packer instance: the IP address must be either stable, or be part of a small, know pool of addresses, so we can whitelist.