This plugin simplifies installing packages with APT while provisioning images with Packer.

  "provisioners": [
    {
      "type": "apt",
      "packages": ["less", "vim-tiny"]
    }

Prerequisites:

• golang-go to build this plugin from source
• packer (use --no-install-recommends to prevent the Debian package of Packer from also installing Docker when you don't need it)
• (optional) packer-builder-nspawn to build Debian container images with systemd-nspawn

For compatibility with the Debian package of Packer that is built with a newer version of ugorji-go-codec than the one pinned in Packer source, this plugin's go.mod includes a replace line to import a similarly patched version of Packer source. To use this plugin with Packer built from unpatched upstream source, comment out that replace line.

• packages - list of packages to install. The plugin uses --no-install-recommends and will not install recommended packages that are not explicitly enumerated.

• sources - additional APT sources to be listed under /etc/apt/sources.list.d.

• keys - list of files with public OpenPGP keys to be used for authenticating packages from the additional APT sources. The key files will be placed under /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d and should use either .gpg (gpg --export) or .asc (gpg --export --armor) format as expected by apt-secure(8).

• cache_dir - local APT cache directory. The default is /var/cache/apt/archives. The directory will be copied into the target under /var/cache/apt/archives before running apt-get install. After provisioning, the directory will be updated with packages from the target cache, and the target cache will be purged with apt-get clean.

When building multiple images with the same or overlapping set of packages, you can pre-populate APT cache before running packer:

apt-get install -y -d -o Dir::Cache::Archives=${cache_dir} ${packages}

The Dir::Cache::Archives part of this command is only necessary if you want to keep your package cache on the host separate from APT's default /var/cache/apt/archives and pass a non-default value of cache_dir to the provisioner.

Copyright (c) 2020 Dmitry Borodaenko [email protected]

This program is free software. You can distribute/modify this program under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or later, or under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0, at your discretion.

This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.

This Source Code Form is not "Incompatible With Secondary Licenses", as defined by the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.