Packer Arch: a template for building Arch base boxes for Vagrant

Question

I thought some people might be interested in my Packer Arch project. It is a bare bones Packer template and installation script that can be used to generate a Vagrant base box for Arch Linux. The template works for both Vagrant's default VirtualBox provider as well as the VMware provider.
If you're not familiar with Vagrant, it's a way to "create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments"...basically an incredibly easy way to spawn temporary virtual machines that you can use for testing/developing anything. In my case I launch Arch VMs to test out Ansible automated configuration tasks that I use to manage some personal servers. Anyway, hope somebody else finds it useful.
https://github.com/elasticdog/packer-arch

Answer 1

Absolutely right. I purposefully wanted to recreate a system that you'd see either out in the wild when purchasing a VPS, or what you'd have after performing a fresh installation from the latest ISO on your own hardware. Even though my end goal was to test Ansible, I didn't include its dependency of Python 2 directly in the build process, but kept things as minimal as possible and use a bootstrap script to handle dependencies after the fact. If you're interested in using Ansible to manage Arch hosts, I did write a quick blog post on my bootstrap process:
    Developing Ansible Playbooks for Arch Linux with Vagrant
...and another project I published called Hyperboriarch has some good examples of doing initial configuration tasks with Ansible (securing ssh, configuring ntp, simple iptables firewall setup, etc.):
    https://github.com/elasticdog/hyperboriarch
</self-promotion>
Last edited by elasticdog (2013-09-27 19:04:04)