This project demonstrates usage of Packer with the new Ubuntu autoinstaller which was introduced in Ubuntu 20.04 while the classic Debian Installer (d-i) using preseed.conf files has been deprecated.
The example uses QEMU/KVM as Packer Builder; you might want to use Vagrant/VirtualBox/etc. instead.
The following tools need to be installed on your Linux build host to build this example project:
- Packer (example config tested with 1.8.0)
- QEMU/KVM
To build the VM with a QEMU window, run:
$ packer build ubuntu-22.04.json
For a headless build (CI, ...) set the is_headless variable:
$ packer build -var 'is_headless=true' ubuntu-22.04.json
Apparently Ubuntu needs a lot of resources while installing. Disk size under 5G or less than 1G RAM seems to result in crashes of the installer at various stages.
"disk_size": "5000M",
"memory": 2048,
Packer seems to have a bug that aborts the VM build after 2-5 minutes regardless of the ssh_timeout setting. As a workaround, set ssh_handshake_attempts to a high value.
"ssh_timeout": "60m", # ignored!?
"ssh_handshake_attempts": 420 # workaround
Display gtk doesn't work on my system, YMMV.
"display": "sdl",
- Ubuntu autoinstall documentation: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/install/autoinstall
- https://www.molnar-peter.hu/en/ubuntu-jammy-netinstall-pxe.html
MIT
- Jeff Geerling for his Packer Boxes project which helped me a lot getting started with local VM builds using Packer some years ago
- Molnár Péter for his excellent blog post about Ubuntu's autoinstaller