nvmlabs / packer-windows-plugins

A suite of Packer plugins for provisioning Windows machines

Packer Windows Plugins

A suite of Packer plugins for provisioning Windows machines using Windows Remote Management.

Status

The plugins are generally available and actively maintained.

The Plugins

We have created the following Windows-specific plugins:

Builders

• VirtualBox ISO and OVF (virtualbox-windows-iso, virtualbox-windows-ovf)
• VMWare ISO and VMX (vmware-windows-iso, vmware-windows-vmx)
• Parallels ISO and PVM (parallels-windows-iso, parallels-windows-pvm)
• Amazon EBS (amazon-windows-ebs)

Provisioners

• Powershell (powershell)
• Windows Shell (windows-shell)
• Restart Windows (restart-windows)

Getting Started

The plugins can be used by downloading pre-built binaries, or by building the project locally and ensuring the binaries are in the correct location.

On Mac OSX using Homebrew

If you are using Homebrew you can follow these steps to install the plugins:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/packer-community/packer-windows-plugins-brew/master/packer-windows-plugins.rb

On Windows Using Chocolatey

choco install packer-windows-plugins

Using pre-built binaries

1. Install Packer
2. Download the latest release for your host environment: packer-windows-plugins/releases
3. Unzip the plugin binaries to a location where Packer will detect them at run-time, such as any of the following:

• The directory where the packer binary is.
• ~/.packer.d/plugins on Unix systems or %APPDATA%/packer.d/plugins on Windows.
• The current working directory.

1. Change to a directory where you have packer templates, and run as usual.

Using a local build

With Go 1.2+ installed, follow these steps to use these community plugins for Windows:

1. Install packer
2. Clone this repo
3. Run make dev
4. Copy the plugin binaries located in ./bin to a location where Packer will detect them at run-time, such as any of the following:

• The directory where the packer binary is. If you've built Packer locally, then Packer and the new plugins are already in $GOPATH/bin together.
• ~/.packer.d/plugins on Unix systems or %APPDATA%/packer.d on Windows.
• The current working directory.

1. Change to a directory where you have packer templates, and run as usual.

A simple Packer template

A simple Packer template for Windows, which utilizes the virtualbox-windows-iso builder and winrm communicator plugins, will look something like

  {
    "builders": [{
      "type": "virtualbox-windows-iso",
      "vm_name": "windows_2012_r2",
      "iso_url": "iso/en_windows_server_2012_r2_with_update_x64_dvd_4065220.iso",
      "iso_checksum_type": "md5",
      "iso_checksum": "af6a7f966b4c4e31da5bc3cdc3afcbec",
      "guest_os_type": "Windows2012_64",
      "boot_wait": "2m",
      "winrm_username": "packer",
      "winrm_password": "packer",
      "winrm_wait_timeout": "10m",
      "shutdown_timeout": "1h",
      "shutdown_command": "shutdown /s /t 10 /f /d p:4:1 /c \"Packer Shutdown\"",
      "disk_size": 61440,
      "format": "ova",
      "floppy_files": [
        "./Autounattend.xml",
        "./enable-winrm.bat",
      ]
    }],
    "provisioners": [{
      "type": "powershell",
      "scripts": [
        "scripts/chocolatey.ps1"
      ]
    },{
      "type": "powershell",
      "inline": [
        "choco install 7zip",
        "choco install dotnet4.5.2"
      ]
    },{
      "type": "windows-shell",
      "scripts": [
        "scripts/netsh.bat"
      ]
    }],
    "post-processors": [{
      "type": "vagrant",
      "output": "windows_2012_r2_virtualbox.box",
      "vagrantfile_template": "Vagrantfile.template"
    }]
  }

Check out these projects for more detailed examples of Windows-centric Packer templates:

• dylanmei/packer-windows-templates
• joefitzgerald/packer-windows
• box-cutter/windows-vm

Running commands with Elevated privileges

In certain situations, you may need to run commands with elevated privileges even if your winrm_username user is an Administrator, for example upgrading system packages like the .NET Framework. In these cases there are 2 additional keys provided on the powershell provisioner that you can supply that will enable this mode: elevated_user and elevated_password:

{
  "type": "powershell",
  "elevated_user":"vagrant",
  "elevated_password":"vagrant",
  "inline": [
    "choco install netfx-4.5.2-devpack"
  ]
}

Community

• IRC: #packer-community on Freenode.
• Slack: packer.slack.com