You're reading from HashiCorp Packer in Production

Product type Book

Published in Jul 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781803246857

Pages 190 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Concepts

Virtualization

Author (1):

John Boero

Table of Contents (18) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Packer’s Beginnings

2. Chapter 1: Packer Fundamentals

3. Chapter 2: Creating Your First Template

4. Chapter 3: Configuring Builders and Sources

5. Chapter 4: The Power of Provisioners

6. Chapter 5: Logging and Troubleshooting

7. Part 2: Managing Large Environments

8. Chapter 6: Working with Builders

9. Chapter 7: Building an Image Hierarchy

10. Chapter 8: Scaling Large Builds

11. Part 3: Advanced Customized Packer

12. Chapter 9: Managing the Image Lifecycle

13. Chapter 10: Using HCP Packer

14. Chapter 11: Automating Packer Builds

15. Chapter 12: Developing Packer Plugins

16. Index

Why subscribe?

17. Other Books You May Enjoy

To get the most out of this book

It will help to have a basic understanding of the HashiCorp Configuration Language, known as HCL2. JSON is also offered as an alternate option to some HCL2 Packer uses. Packer and most HashiCorp projects are written in Golang, also known as Go, but this will only be necessary if encountering a bug in Packer or extending Packer by writing a plugin.

The Packer binary is built for most common platforms and architectures, including Linux and Windows, and the most common architectures, such as x86_64 and ARM/AArch64. Since Packer is statically linked, it relies on no external libraries and the underlying operating system shouldn’t affect the user experience unless using external plugins that aren’t built for your target platform.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
HCL2	Platform agnostic
JSON	Platform agnostic
Golang	Platform agnostic

If running Packer in production, make sure to install only official releases signed with the HashiCorp engineering signing keys. The code for this book requires at least Packer version 1.7. Future releases may change behavior, so please verify the newest Packer release that works for you. For development or following along with this book, you may build Packer from the source or use a binary directly from the HashiCorp releases page: https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Every sample of code for this book can be considered platform agnostic. It can be run on Windows or Linux, or even Raspberry Pi. Adjust the code as necessary to suit your platform. Packer is designed to run on just about anything and remote builds in the cloud will not require large amounts of resources locally. Local builds or virtual machines may require local storage and RAM.