This repository will contain the packer templates required to build and harden an AWS AMI

For this example I will be following steps required to run the installation and configuration of Packer on a Linux machine This setup can be done on your local workstation.

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.5.6/packer_1.5.6_linux_amd64.zip -O packer.zip

Now unzip the packer executable and copy it to your $PATH so that you can run packer commands from anywhere on the cli

unzip packer.zip
sudo mv packer /usr/bin/

That is all the steps required to setup packer. To test the setup run the following command

packer --help

Packer plugins can be installed two ways

1. By simply downloading the plugin binary and placing it in the path
2. Cloning the repository of the plugin, building it locally, and then storing it in the path

The first method is very straigth-forward similar to how we installed packer.

To do it using the second method, we would need to install go (version >= 1.11) on our local workstations.

# Find the version available 
$ sudo apt list -a golang-go
Listing... Done
golang-go/focal,now 2:1.13~1ubuntu2 amd64

$ sudo apt-get install -y golang-go==2:1.13~1ubuntu2

To download the plugin, clone the git repo

git clone https://github.com/SwampDragons/packer-provisioner-comment.git

Then move to the new folder

cd packer-provisioner-comment/

go mod download

go build

Now that the plugin binary has been created, we need to decide how we make the plugin available. We can either copy it to the global $PATH for all users, or put it in ~/.packer.d/plugins path to make it available for your user only.

mkdir ~/.packer.d/plugins

Note that plugins must by named in the packer-type-name format — in this case, packer-provisioner-comment

mv main ~/.packer.d/plugins/packer-provision-comment