Repacker

Repacker helps you modularise and re-use packer templates. Dont repeat yourself.

Things you can do with repacker:

Re-use pre-existing open-source packer templates with your own infrastructure; Maintain libraries of provisioners/post-processors and apply them to multiple builds; Safely pull in changes from upstream without having to manually merge templates. Lots of other stuff

Install

Make sure you have nodejs and packer installed, then run

npm install -g repacker

Run

Write a Repackerfile in your packer template's directory and invoke repacker.

It will invoke packer to build the referenced templates, integrating all the transformations included in the Repackerfile.

What happens then?

Repacker does the following steps:

1. Take an existing packer template from either:-

   1. a local file;
   2. a remote git repo;
   3. an empty file.

2. Apply a set of transformations to it.

   1. Each of the four packer template sections (variables, builders, provisioners, post-processors) can be transformed.
   2. The transformations applied are (in order)
      1. Replace a section;
      2. Include content in a section;
      3. Apply JSONPath edits

3. Execute packer with options

   1. only: run a specific builder
   2. vars: add variables to packer build command line.
   3. varfiles: add varfiles to the packer build commaind line

4. Move any output files to a specified location.

Get the target template

todo

Transformations

The transformations applied are as follows, in this order:-

1. Replace

Replace a packer section (variables, builders, provisioners, post-processors) with a fragment from the repacker file or another json or yaml file.

1. Include

Append content into a packer section with a fragment from the repacker file or another json or yaml file.

1. JSONpath edit

Use standard JSONpath to edit individual settings

Execute

todo

Move

todo

Repacker file format