Building Vagrant boxes with Packer

While packaging boxes from ISO images and manual provisioning can be a useful solution to share virtual machines, manual maintenance and updating of virtual machines can be time consuming and difficult to manage.

HashiCorp (the company that provides Vagrant) created a project solely for the purpose of creating and packaging virtual environments for a variety of virtualization platforms. This product is aptly named Packer (http://packer.io). Packer uses configuration files to specify the end result of a packaged virtual machine. In particular, Packer groups commands into:

• Builders: These are commands and instructions to build a virtual machine using ISO files and bootstrapping commands. A builder can specify instructions for a number of platforms, such as using preseed files to create Ubuntu machines or API information to create Amazon Web Services AMI files. A Packer file might specify multiple Builders in the same file, allowing several virtual machine...