June 20, 2017

Experiments with Vagrant and Packer on Debian

  —A look at Vagrant and Packer (Debian).

I had occasion recently to review Vagrant and Packer from Hashi Corp. My review involved an exploration of whether Packer is useful for bootstrapping virtual machine. I ended up selecting a project by Pierre Mavro called packer-debian.

I am impressed with the power provided by Packer and Vagrant. They achieve the goal of automating the construction and deployment of virtual machines while enabling control of the virtual machine configuration. Very powerful tools.

My only disappointment with Packer is that the JSON files used to configure the virtual machine do not seem to support comments.

My experiments are located on GitHub. Ultimately, my experiments are directed at creating virtual machines for ancient operating systems. My immediate goal is to ensure that I can build an application on Fedora 13. (Yes, 13. Long story.). I will publish my work on GitHub as it progresses.

With thanks to Pierre Mavro for publishing his work. It enabled me to use a working example as a basis for my own investigation.