Install Packer on Linux

Intro

Packer is another fantastic tool in the infrastructure as code tool belt from Hashicorp. Packer allows you to build base or golden images for Hypervisors such as KVM, Virtualbox and VMware based on configuration files. But that is not all, it can even build images for cloud providers such as Azure, AWS as well as Docker and LXC. That is pretty baller when you think about it.

In this post I will show you how to install Packer on a Linux machine. I will be installing Packer on an Ubuntu machine, but the instructions are compatible with most other modern linux distributions.

The following code versions will be used in this lab.

• Ubuntu - 1804
• Packer - 1.4.0

Installation

Download Packer

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.4.0/packer_1.4.0_linux_amd64.zip

Unzip Packer zipfile.

unzip packer_1.4.0_linux_amd64.zip

Move Packer executable to /opt directory.

sudo mkdir /opt/packer/
sudo mv packer /opt/packer/packer

Link Packer executable to a location in your $PATH .

sudo ln -s /opt/packer/packer /usr/local/bin/packer

Testing

Confirm the packer command is available.

which packer

# output

/usr/local/bin/packer

Check the version of Packer.

packer --version

# output

1.4.0

Outro

You now have a working Packer install so go out and build some infrastructure as code already.