Packer with Puppet Example

This expands on the basic Packer tutorial by showing how to:

• Install Puppet modules for use in the puppet run
• Supplement those Puppet modules with your own
• Set up a basic Hiera configuration for your classes
• Select different "roles" which define different sets of Puppet classes to include

Running Packer

This example builds and uploads AWS images, which requires AWS credentials. To configure this, I recommend you create (but not check in) a credentials.json file containing your AWS credentials. It should look like this:

{
    "aws_access_key": "YOUR ACCESS KEY GOES HERE",
    "aws_secret_key": "YOUR SECRET KEY GOES HERE"
}

The Packer specs and Puppet manifests for configuring the images are built by Rake. You can run rake -T to find out which targets are available; the Packer targets are under rake packs:*. To build all of the images, do this:

rake packs:all:build

Configuring Nodes

Packer can easily generate multiple different images with the same configuration, but it is not so handy when it comes to generating different kinds of images, which may correspond to different machine "roles".

Inspired by the example provided byJames Carr's blog post, we provide a mechanism to specify different kinds of nodes, which differ only in their Puppet node configuration. The configuration of these different image kinds is managed by nodes.yaml.

To define a new kind of node, edit nodes.yaml and add your node name as a new key at the top level. The classes list underneath it is a list of Puppet classes to be included for the specified node. Rake will generate all the necessary tasks to manage this kind of node based on the contents of nodes.yaml.