Git push to build Vagrant Boxes with Atlas

Today I have tested the new available service Atlas to build Vagrant Boxes with Packer in the Cloud.

As the time of writing there is no direct GitHub integration for Atlas. So I just added another CI server as a glue between GitHub and Atlas to make it work. For this example I used CircleCI. And I love to receive Slack notifications of this build pipeline.

This is my current workflow

packer-atlas-workflow

GitHub repo

For this blog post I have created an example repo with an Ubuntu 14.04 packer template from the boxcutter Team.

Atlas

atlas-create-token

CircleCI

circle-build-project

Now go to the project settings and add an environment variable ATLAS_TOKEN with the Token that we have generated in Atlas.

circle-add-atlas-token

Now the connection between GitHub and CircleCI and Atlas is established.

git push

After each git push CircleCI builds the project. It downloads and installs Packer 0.8.1 and starts packer push

This is the circle.yml used in this example.

machine:
  timezone: Europe/Berlin

  environment:
    PACKER_VERSION: 0.8.1

dependencies:
  pre:
    - >
      sudo apt-get install -qq wget unzip &&
      sudo mkdir /opt/packer &&
      pushd /opt/packer &&
      echo "Downloading packer ${PACKER_VERSION}..." &&
      sudo wget --no-verbose https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/packer/packer_${PACKER_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip &&
      echo "Installing packer ${PACKER_VERSION}..." &&
      sudo unzip packer_${PACKER_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip &&
      sudo rm packer_${PACKER_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip &&
      pushd /usr/bin &&
      sudo ln -s /opt/packer/* .

deployment:
  publish:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - packer push -name=StefanScherer/packer-atlas-example packer-atlas-example.json

git-push

This will just upload the packer template and files into Atlas. In Atlas the main work begins. A parallel build of the Vagrant Box for VMware and VirtualBox is started.

atlas-packer-build

The deployment to Atlas is configured in the Packer template in the post-processor section.

  "post-processors": [
    [
      {
        "type": "vagrant",
        "keep_input_artifact": false
      },
      {
        "type": "atlas",
        "only": ["vmware-iso"],
        "artifact": "StefanScherer/packer-atlas-example",
        "artifact_type": "vagrant.box",
        "metadata": {
          "provider": "vmware_desktop",
          "version": "{{ user `version` }}",
          "created_at": "{{timestamp}}"
        }
      },
      {
        "type": "atlas",
        "only": ["virtualbox-iso"],
        "artifact": "StefanScherer/packer-atlas-example",
        "artifact_type": "vagrant.box",
        "metadata": {
          "provider": "virtualbox",
          "version": "{{ user `version` }}",
          "created_at": "{{timestamp}}"
        }
      }
    ]

After a while the Vagrant Boxes are deployed to Atlas and are available for your Vagrantfile.

Vagrant up

You now can use the new Vagrant Box with

vagrant init StefanScherer/packer-atlas-example
vagrant up

Thanks to Hashicorp for that great service!

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