Packer Alpine Image

Builds Alpine Linux using QEMU and imports image as private template (custom image) to UpCloud.

Note that image has not been tested for production!

Usage

Check variable defauls from alpine.pkr.hcl and build using defaults:

$ make build

Use packer cli to overwrite default values. For example make template available in fi-hel1 and fi-hel2 zones:

$ packer build -var 'upcloud_zones=["fi-hel1", "fi-hel2"]' alpine.pkr.hcl

Using defaults requires that UPCLOUD_API_PASSWORD and UPCLOUD_API_USER are provided using environment variables.
When deploying the server metadata service needs to enabled from UpCloud's control panel for image to work properly.

Note that in a absence of KVM acceleration you need to increase wait times (boot_wait and inside boot_command) heavily.

Deployment example

Deploy image using Terraform and setup instance using user_data. This example assumes that template was created with name alpine-3-15-amd64 and that it's available in pl-waw1 zone.

alpine.tf

terraform {
  required_providers {
    upcloud = {
      source  = "UpCloudLtd/upcloud"
      version = "~>2.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "upcloud" {}

data "upcloud_storage" "alpine_image" {
  type = "template"
  name = "alpine-3-15-amd64"
}

resource "upcloud_server" "alpine" {
  hostname = data.upcloud_storage.alpine_image.name
  zone     = "pl-waw1"
  metadata = true
  plan     = "1xCPU-1GB"

  network_interface {
    type = "public"
  }

  template {
    storage = data.upcloud_storage.alpine_image.id
    size    = 20
  }

  user_data = templatefile("alpine_user_data.sh", {}) 
}

alpine_user_data.sh

#!/bin/ash

apk -U upgrade
apk add nginx

# ... do more setup tasks at last stages in boot process. Network is available at this point.

Debugging

Use PACKER_LOG=1 environment variable to get more detailed logs. Check Packer's debugging documentation for more info.
You can also set QEMU headless property to false to see what is happening during OS build process.