The Packer Book

0.1 Who is this book for?

This book is a hands-on introduction to Packer, the HashiCorp image builder. The book is for engineers, developers, sysadmins, operations staff, and those with an interest in infrastructure, configuration management, or DevOps. It assumes no prior knowledge of Packer. If you're a Packer guru, you might find some of this book too introductory.

There is an expectation that the reader has basic Unix/Linux skills and is familiar with Git version control, the command line, editing files, installing packages, managing services, and basic networking.

Finally, Packer is evolving quickly and has only just reached a 1.0.0 release state. That means "here be dragons," and you should take care when using Packer in production.

This book assumes you are using Packer 1.0.3 or later. Earlier versions may not work as described.

0.2 Credits and acknowledgments

Ruth Brown, who continues to humor these books and my constant tap-tap-tap of keys late into the night.
Sid Orlando, who not only edited this book but continues to make me laugh at inappropriate moments.
Gareth Rushgrove and Anna Kennedy for their Packer Serverspec examples.

Packer™ is a registered trademark of HashiCorp, Inc.

0.3 Technical reviewers

Thanks to the folks who helped make this book more accurate and useful.

0.3.1 Rickard von Essen

Rickard von Essen works as a Continuous Delivery and Cloud Consultant at Diabol. He helps companies deliver faster, improve continuously, and worry less. In his spare time, he helps maintain Packer and contributes to numerous other FOSS projects. He has been tinkering with Linux and BSD since the late 1990s, and has been hacking since the Amiga era. When not fiddling with computers, he spends his time with his wife and two children in Stockholm, Sweden. Rickard has a Master of Computer Science and Engineering from Linköping University.

0.3.2 Ben Allen

Ben Allen is a SecOps engineer who works with BlueTarp Financial to build secure cloud environments across platforms. Throughout his career he’s been an automation evangelist who helps drive organizations to codify processes and build durable, automated assets. Ben’s background as a DevOps engineer and a sysadmin has been spent in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. He is a certified SaltStack engineer, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and holds several Microsoft certifications. Ben earned his Bachelor’s degree in network engineering and serves the advisory boards of higher education institutions that help modernize technology curriculums.

0.3.3 Daniel Linder

Daniel Linder is a Systems Architect at West Corporation. He is responsible for the life cycle of all Windows, RedHat, Solaris, and AIX platforms at West. He is also responsible for leading West's transition to private cloud, including their Packer implementation. Daniel is a RedHat Certified System Administrator and has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska.

0.4 Editor

Sid Orlando is a writer and editor (among some other things) who may or may not have recurring dreams about organizing her closet with dreamscape Docker containers. Find her on Twitter: @ohreallysid.

0.5 Author

James is an author and engineer. His most recent books are The Packer Book; The Terraform Book; The Art of Monitoring; The Docker Book, about the open-source container virtualization technology; and The Logstash Book, about the popular open-source logging tool. James also authored two books about Puppet, Pro Puppet and Pulling Strings with Puppet. He is the author of three other books: Pro Linux System Administration, Pro Nagios 2.0, and Hardening Linux.

He is currently CTO at Empatico and was formerly CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Services and Support at Docker, VP of Engineering at Venmo, and VP of Technical Operations at Puppet. He likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.

0.6 Conventions in the book

This is an inline code statement.

This is a code block:

This is a code block

Long code strings are broken. If you see . . . in a code block it indicates that the output has been shortened for brevity's sake.

0.7 Code and examples

The code and example configurations contained in the book are available on GitHub at:

https://github.com/turnbullpress/packerbook-code

0.8 Colophon

This book was written in Markdown with a large dollop of LaTeX. It was then converted to PDF and other formats using Pandoc (with some help from scripts written by the excellent folks who wrote Backbone.js on Rails).

0.9 Errata

Please email any errata you find to james+errata@lovedthanlost.net.

0.10 Disclaimer

This book is presented solely for educational purposes. The author is not offering it as legal, accounting, or other professional services advice. While best efforts have been used in preparing this book, the author makes no representations or warranties of any kind and assumes no liabilities of any kind with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness of use for a particular purpose. The author shall not be held liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or incidental or consequential damages caused, or alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information or programs contained herein. Every company is different and the advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should seek the services of a competent professional before beginning any infrastructure project.

0.11 Copyright

Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the prior permission of the publisher.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit here.

0.12 Version

This is version 1.0.0 (9dce66c) of The Packer Book.