iac-packer-qemu

A Docker image (~470MB) with packer and qemu to play with infrastructure as code.

Usage:

# docker run --rm -it raonigabriel/iac-packer-qemu

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Samples:

1) Alpine /samples/alpine.json

This is a packer sample that produces a ~140MB tar gz compressed, raw-disk alpine image that you can later import into your virtualization platform (GCP, AMI, VirtualBox, KVM...)

It uses packer + qemu to provision (download and install) a small alpine installation based on GRUB, LVM, XFS plus a 512 MB swap partition.
Additionally, it will also install docker (as a service) and setup SSH key-based authentication.

Lets recap: you will be using Docker to run packer wich will in turn use qemu to spawn a small VM (no KVM required) to automatically download and install Alpine Linux.
You could use this docker image during your CI/CD builds to generate standardized base-images for your Amazon AWS or GCP Compute Engine instances. The provisioning itself could also be automated using terraform if wanted. For an example, check its github action. You can have them running with your build process. Generated artifacts (keypair and image) from the job's execution can be downloaded. See here.

User/password (for the VM) are: root/alpine
Keep in mind that SSH password-based authentication is DISABLED., hence you have two options:

• Change the root password during build. See /samples/alpine.json and /samples/www/alpine-setup.sh.
• Provide your keys for SSH. See /samples/build-alpine-image.

# docker run --rm -it -p 2222:2222 -p 5900:5900 -p 8000:8000 -v /tmp:/samples/images raonigabriel/iac-packer-qemu ./build-alpine-image.sh
# .... (docker container running, 6 minutes later)
# ls -la /tmp/alpine.tar.gz

Notice how we are publishing ports (-p) above. That enables you to see what's going on during build time:

1. Port 2222 will allow you to connect to the temporary SSH server used by Packer.
2. Port 5900 will allow you to connect to the temporary embedded QEMU VNC port that is used during the build.
3. Port 5900 will allow you to connect to the temporary Packer HTTP Server.

Notice how we are bind-mounting the host tmp dir (/tmp) to /samples/images (-v) above. This is to allow ourselves to grab the image (remember that the image is generated inside the docker container)

Also notice that we are generating ssh keys inside the container then using it to setup the generated image's authorized keys.
If you want to use your own authorized_keys, keys, you just need to bind mount them to /samples/authorized_keys so the container can use them.
See /samples/build-apline-image.sh to understand that.

Heavilly inspired by the manual steps described here.

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License

Released under the Apache 2.0 license

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Disclaimer

• This code comes with no warranty. Use it at your own risk.
• I don't like Apple. Fuck off, fan-boys.
• I don't like left-winged snowflakes. Fuck off, code-covenant.
• I will call my branches the old way. Long live master, fuck-off renaming