jzohrab / poc-packer-win2016-jenkins-slave

Proof-of-concept Jenkins Windows slave for AWS

An Amazon EC2 Windows build slave provisioned using Packer.

This project has two main features:

• pre-provisioning of common build tools using Packer
• the Jenkins swarm plugin and a launch script for slaves to auto-register with the Jenkins master.

Usage

Building AMIs

$ REPO=`git remote get-url origin` \
  SHA=`git log -n 1 --format=%h` \
  packer build \
  -var='region=us-east-1' \
  -var='instance_type=m4.large' \
  -var-file=./aws_secret.json \
  template.json

packer verify before you build.

See template.json for the list of variables needed.

Launching instances

The slaves are provisioned with a startup script (scripts/start_slave.ps1) which can be called as user data, e.g.:

aws ec2 run-instances \
    --image-id $AMIID \
...
    --user-data "<powershell>& C:\start_slave.ps1 -master_private_ip <ip_here> -label sensei_build</powershell><persist>true</persist>" \
    --query "Instances[*].InstanceId"

Use the script launch_slaves.sh to ensure that the slaves are in the same subnet and security groups as the Jenkins master.

Connectivity and auto-registration

Jenkins will need to be configured specifically for slaves to auto-register. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32886262/jenkins-swarm-plugin-authentication.

Todo

• Fix tags (ref template.json "tags") - should be more sensible

Refs

Builds on work from Vincent Rivellino and Peter Goodman, see http://blog.petegoo.com/2016/05/10/packer-aws-windows/.