How To Create a Custom Image Using Packer In GCP

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Hello Readers, We’ll see how we can create a Custom Image Using Packer In GCP in this blog. Before starting you must have to install Packer and we will use a service account to connect my google account, so make sure you have both things ready.

What is Packer?

Packer is a simple tool for building customized images. It is an open-source DevOps tool by Hashicorp to create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single JSON config file. A common use case is to create a golden image that teams can use across an organization on a cloud infrastructure. We can use packer for AWS, GCP, AZURE, etc.

If you don’t have a packer on your machine refer to the official packer documents and Install the packer.

https://www.packer.io/downloads

Create A Service Account in GCP

A service account is a special type of Google account that is associated with an application or VM, instead of an individual end-user.

From the search box search IAM & admin.
Under IAM sections select Service Accounts
Click on Create Service Account

Give the name of the Service Account and press CREATE AND CONTINUE.
Now give the following permission .

Now Download the ServiceAccount key for authentication.

Create a Sample Packer Template for Google Cloud

The packer templates are written in JSON format. So create a .json file and configure the custom image.

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "googlecompute",
      "account_file": "/home/knoldus/Downloads/mythical-willow-342005-ed6b45a7f0d1.json",
      "project_id": "mythical-willow-342005",
      "source_image": "debian-9-stretch-v20200805",
      "ssh_username": "packer",
      "zone": "us-central1-a"
    }
  ],
  "provisioners": [
   {
     "type": "file",
     "source": "hello.txt",
     "destination": "/tmp/hello.txt"
     }
     ]  
}

Builders: The builder component let the packer know what platform or vendor we are building an image of, including API key information, a source image, and other information like region, zone, instance name, etc. For this blog, we are using google compute builder.

Provisioners: Provisioner is here to tell packer what it has to install and configure inside VM after booting.

NOTE: Change the service account key file name,project_id, and give the right path of the service account key file.

Now, check whether the template is valid or not for validating run the below command:

$ packer validate <.jsonfile>
The configuration is valid.

Create a Custom image:

Run the following command to create a custom image:

$ packer build <.jsonfile>

You can see in the above image the custom image has been created and It does all the things we do manually for creating a custom image. When image creation will be finish it will delete the instance , you’ll be able to see your machine image Compute Engine->Images.

References:

https://www.packer.io/plugins/builders/googlecompute

Conclusion:

In this blog, we saw how to create a custom image using packer. I hope you liked it. Any suggestions or feedback let me know in the comment section. Thank you for sticking to the end. Please clap it, if you find it useful.