Proxmox Builder

Acknowledgement

This is forked from Christian Wagner's work.

Differences

This differs from upstream in several ways, most notably the absence of anything but Debian.

• Adds optional ZFS support

• Assumes zsh instead of bash

• Installs asdf and various plugins

• Installs oh-my-zsh and various plugins

• Installs p10k and a custom theme

• Installs neovim, plugged, and various plugins

• Optionally builds Python from source with full optimizations

Limitations

Only the debian10-amd64 and debian11-amd64 roles have been modified. If you want to use another one, either use the upstream, or submit a PR. Also, the build scripts aren't necessarily backwards compatible with the debian10 template. It will probably work if you select a different release requirement (<2.0.0).

Prerequisites

• Ansible - tested on 2.11.

• j2cli

• dialog - optional, but it lets you use a glorious 90s menu.

• Packer - tested on v1.66 for VE6 and v1.85 for VE7.

• Proxmox VE 6 or VE 7 (see Packer note above).

Usage

From within debian-11-amd64-proxmox, execute either ../build.sh or ../build_menu.sh. The former is from the original repo, with some modifications to support extra customizations. The latter requires dialog (might work with whiptail) to be installed, but is arguably easier to use than remembering 10 positional arguments. It includes the same default values as the non-TUI script, which you can modify as desired.

Note that you may/will also need to set up some env vars, like proxmox_url, proxmox_user, and proxmox_token. You can also use proxmox_password if you'd rather, but there isn't any support that I'm aware of for 2FA, so you'd have to disable that first.

Arguments

VM_NODE - Name of the node to lookup - defaults to pve

VM_NET_BRIDGE - Network bridge to use - defaults to vmbr0

VM_ROLE - (prod|dev) - dev loads extra packages - defaults to dev

VM_SOCKETS - Number of sockets for template - defaults to 2

VM_CORES - Number of cores for template - defaults to 4

VM_MEM - Size of RAM (in megabytes) - defaults to 16384

VM_DISK - Size of disk (with suffix) - defaults to 16G

VM_ZFS - Build support for ZFS - defaults to false

VM_ID - ID for template - defaults to 999

Things You Need To Change

• In debian-11-amd64-proxmox/playbook/server-template-vars.yml, you'll need to replace my public key with yours. This sets up password-less SSH auth, so without a key, you're gonna have a bad time.

Things You Might Want To Change

• vmbr0 is usually the default network bridge in Proxmox. You may not want VMs being built to get an IP address handed out from there.
• Set a static IP. That's actually not handled here, it's in the ansible-initial-server repo that this one calls.
• Speaking of, you may need to bump the version in debian-11-amd64-proxmox/playbook/requirements.yml. Check releases for ansible-initial-server.
• Still speaking of, the above repo, in files/20-motd-welcome will create a lovely ASCII art image for you. Your terminal should be >= 125 columns wide to see it correctly. If you think 80 is the right number, please don't use my repos. Also, if you want to change it, clone that repo and edit the file, or clone that repo and remove the Ansible task.

Things This Doesn't Do

• Set a user password. It could if you wanted to modify the user Ansible task, or run passwd as a shell task, or any other number of ways. Set it manually if you don't want to do those; also of note, this sets up password-less sudo so it's not really needed for most tasks.

• Set up PATH for most modifications if you don't use zsh. It's a trivial change to add it for bash. I don't, though, so... submit a PR.

• Make a unique hostname. It defaults to deb11-kvm. You can change the default in debian-11-amd64-proxmox/playbook/server-template-vars.yml if you'd like. Alternately, you can use Ansible (or some other tool) to change it for you in your VMs - that's what I'm doing.

Questions and Answers

Q: Will you do this for another distribution?

A: No, I stan Debian.

Q: What about Ubuntu?

A: Debian, you peasant.

Q: Will you do this for ESXi/Hyper-V/whatever-FreeNAS-calls-its-hypervisor?

A: No.

Q: Was this a tremendous waste of time for a task that you do maybe once every few years?

A: Yes.