Packer - CentOS 8.0 Vagrant Box With GNOME Desktop

Current CentOS Version Used: 8.0 (1905)

Pre-built Vagrant Box:

• vagrant init nitindas/centos-8.0

This example build configuration installs and configures CentOS 8.0 x86_64.

Requirements

The following software must be installed/present on your local machine before you can use Packer to build the Vagrant box file:

• Packer 1.2.5
• Vagrant 2.2.6
• VirtualBox 6.0.14 (if you want to build the VirtualBox box)
• Vagrant cloud account username as password

Usage

Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed, then cd to the directory containing this README.md file, and run:

$ centos8.0-packer-build.sh <VagrantCloud User/login> <VagrantCloud Password>

After a few minutes, Packer should tell you the box was generated successfully, and the box was uploaded to Vagrant Cloud.

Note: This configuration includes a post-processor that pushes the built box to Vagrant Cloud (which requires a VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable to be set); remove the vagrant-cloud post-processor from the Packer template to build the box locally and not push it to Vagrant Cloud. You don’t need to specify a version variable either, if not using the vagrant-cloud post-processor.

Testing built boxes

There’s an included Vagrantfile that allows quick testing of the built Vagrant boxes. From VagrantFile-Example/ directory, run one the following command after building the box:

$ cd VagrantFile-Example/
$ vagrant up

License

MIT license.