Introduction

In this post I will cover installation of Hashicorp Packer on my Linux box (Pop!_OS / Ubuntu). Packer has a repository that can easily be added, making the process simple and familiar.

Instructions at developer.hashicorp.com

Following the installation instructions provided at developer.hashicorp.com , the process is familiar for many packages. Be sure to select "Ubuntu/Debian" to follow along.

• First, add the HashiCorp GPGKey

  $ wget -O - https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg

• Next, add the repository

  $ echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list

• Finally, update and install packer

  $ sudo apt update 
  $ sudo apt install packer

Verifying the installation

A simple verification of the installation can be had by checking the version and help:

$ packer --version
Packer v1.12.0

$ packer --help
Usage: packer [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    build           build image(s) from template
    console         creates a console for testing variable interpolation
    fix             fixes templates from old versions of packer
    fmt             Rewrites HCL2 config files to canonical format
    hcl2_upgrade    transform a JSON template into an HCL2 configuration
    init            Install missing plugins or upgrade plugins
    inspect         see components of a template
    plugins         Interact with Packer plugins and catalog
    validate        check that a template is valid
    version         Prints the Packer version

Further information

My goal is to use Packer and Ansible to create digitalocean droplets that are quick and easy to scale as needed. This is part of my attempt to implement Infrastructure as code (IaC) in my projects (even simple projects). If you'd like to follow along, check out the devops tag or infrastructure as code (IaC) tag . I'm not an expert, but I'm sure I'll get the basics going!