Create a custom OpenStack image with Packer

Last updated 24th October 2018

Objective

This guide will show you how to create a Packer configuration file to create your own OpenStack image.

Requirements

You'll need an OVHcloud Public Cloud OpenStack project and a terminal.

Install Packer

Packer can be downloaded from the official website (currently here ) and you'll need to unzip it.

For Linux 64bits

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.3.1/packer_1.3.1_linux_amd64.zip
unzip packer_1.3.1_linux_amd64.zip

Install jq

jq is a command line tool for parsing JSON document. It'll be used to automate the configuration file creation.

apt-get install jq

Fetch your openrc.sh configuration

From OVHcloud Control Panel, fetch your openrc.sh configuration file. You can fetch it from OpenStack menu entry in the left panel and under the ... button on the right Download an OpenStack configuration file. You might need to create an OpenStack user before.

Install openstack command line client

The easier way is to use a python virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv3 # creates a virtualenv named venv3
. ./venv3/bin/activate # enter the virtualenv
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install python-openstackclient

or install your distribution package apt-get install python-openstackclient

Verification

Sourcing the openrc.sh configuration file retrieved before, try your local setup with

. ./openrc.sh
openstack token issue

Packer configuration

First, source your openrc.sh file with

. ./openrc.sh

Next, let's find some needed ID. You'll need the ID of the image, flavor and network. We'll build our image from Ubuntu 16.04 on a vps-ssd-1 hardware, with a interface connected on public network Ext-Net

SOURCE_ID=`openstack image list -f json | jq -r '.[] | select(.Name == "Ubuntu 16.04") | .ID'`
FLAVOR_ID=`openstack flavor list -f json | jq -r '.[] | select(.Name == "vps-ssd-1") | .ID'`
NETWORK_ID=`openstack network list -f json | jq -r '.[] | select(.Name == "Ext-Net") | .ID'`

INFO: for FLAVOR_ID, you can directly use the name, ie vps-ssd-1

Finaly, create a packer.json file

cat > packer.json <<EOF
{
    "builders": [
        {
            "type": "openstack",
            "username": "$OS_USERNAME",
            "password": "$OS_PASSWORD",
            "identity_endpoint": "$OS_AUTH_URL",
            "region": "$OS_REGION_NAME",
            "tenant_id": "$OS_TENANT_ID",
            "image_name": "My Custom Image",
            "ssh_username": "ubuntu",
            "source_image": "$SOURCE_ID",
            "flavor": "$FLAVOR_ID",
            "ssh_ip_version": "4",
            "networks": [
                "$NETWORK_ID"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "provisioners": [
        {
            "script": "setup_vm.sh",
            "type": "shell"
        }
    ]
}
EOF

In the last selection of the configuration file, we specify a setup_vm.sh shell script to be ran.

#!/bin/sh

set -ex

if [ `id -u` -ne 0 ]; then
     sudo $0
    exit 0
fi

## your custom code below
apt-get install git
git clone ...

Building the image

Using the configuration file create above, check it and build the image with

packer validate packer.json
packer build packer.json

If all went ok, you should have a new image available. You can check with

openstack image list | grep 'My Custom Image'

Go further

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.

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