Packer Vagrant Box Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

This is a Packer post-processor plugin to upload versioned boxes to Google Compute Storage (GCS).

Requirements

• Packer
• Go 1.13

Installation

Install from release:

• Download binaries from the releases page.
• Install the plugin, or simply put it into the same directory with JSON templates.
• Move the downloaded binary to ~/.packer.d/plugins/

Install from sources:

Clone repository and build

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/arnaud-dezandee; cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/arnaud-dezandee
$ git clone git@github.com:arnaud-dezandee/packer-vagrant-box-gcs.git

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/arnaud-dezandee/packer-vagrant-box-gcs
$ go install

Link the build to Packer

$ ln -s $GOPATH/bin/packer-vagrant-box-gcs ~/.packer.d/plugins/packer-post-processor-vagrant-box-gcs 

Usage

Add the plugin to your packer template after vagrant post-processor

{
  "builder": [{
    "type": "virtualbox-iso"
  }],
  "post-processors": [
    [
      {
        "type": "vagrant"
      },
      {
        "type": "vagrant-box-gcs",
        "box_name": "myorg/mybox",
        "bucket": "my-gcs-bucket",
        "version": "1.0.0"
      }
    ]
  ]
}

This will create two objects inside the bucket

gs://my-gcs-bucket/myorg/mybox
gs://my-gcs-bucket/myorg/boxes/mybox/1.0.0/virtualbox.box

With the help of vagrant-box-gcs plugin, you can now point your Vagrantfile to the manifest

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "myorg/mybox"
  config.vm.box_url = "gs://my-gcs-bucket/myorg/mybox"
end

Authentication

Authenticating with Google Cloud services requires at most one JSON file. Packer will look for credentials in the following places, preferring the first location found:

1. An account_file option in your packer file.

2. A JSON file (Service Account) whose path is specified by the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.

3. A JSON file in a location known to the gcloud command-line tool. (gcloud auth application-default login creates it)

   On Windows, this is:

   %APPDATA%/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json
   

   On other systems:

   $HOME/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json
   

4. On Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine Managed VMs, it fetches credentials from the metadata server. (Needs a correct VM authentication scope configuration)

Configuration Reference

There are many configuration options available for the plugin. They are segmented below into two categories: required and optional parameters.

Required:

• box_name (string) - The name of your box. (e.g. hashicorp/precise64)

• bucket (string) - The GCS bucket name where files will be uploaded to.

• version (string) - The version of the box you are uploading. (e.g. 1.0.0)

Optional:

• account_file (string) - The JSON file containing your account credentials.

• box_dir (string) - The path to a directory in your bucket to store boxes.

  Defaults to {{ box_name[org] }}/boxes/{{ box_name[title] }}/{{ version }}.

• box_manifest (string) - The path to the manifest file in your bucket.

  Defaults to {{ box_name }}.

Related

• vagrant-box-gcs - Vagrant plugin to download boxes from Google GCS.
• packer-post-processor-vagrant-s3 - A Packer post-processor to upload vagrant boxes to S3.