Kamatera

Type: kamatera

The kamatera Packer builder builds Kamatera cloud images and adds them to the account's disk library.

The builder process is as follows:

1. Create a temporary Kamatera server according to the builder configuration
2. Establish SSH connection to the server
3. Run provisioners
4. Create a Kamatera hard disk image from the server
5. Poweroff and terminate the server

For details on how to use the Kamatera builder please see the Tutorial below.

Configuration Reference

Required Builder Configuration options:

• api_secret (string) - The Kamatera API secret to use. It can also be specified via environment variable KAMATERA_API_SECRET.
• api_client_id (string) - The Kamatera API client ID to use. It can also be specified via environment variable KAMATERA_API_CLIENT_ID.
• datacenter (string) - The Kamatera datacenter to which the server is deployed.
• ssh_username (string) - Must be set with a value of root

Optional:

• image_name (string) - The name of the resulting image that will appear in your Kamatera hard disk library. Defaults to packer-{{timestamp}}.
• cpu (string) - The cpu assigned to the temporary server. Default to 1A.
• ram (string) - The ram assigned to the temporary server. Default to 1024.
• image (string) - The image used by the temporary server. Default to ubuntu_server_18.04_64-bit.
• disk (string) - The disk size in GB assigned to the temporary server. Default to 10.
• script (string) - Script to run for provisioning the server - Bash for linux images, Powershell for windows images.
• disable_ssh (bool) - Disable SSH access to the server, this is required when provisioning a Windows image.

Tutorial

This tutorial creates a Linux machine image, for Windows images see below.

Set environment variables with your Kamatera API key (you can generate an API key from the Kamatera console -> API -> Keys):

export KAMATERA_API_CLIENT_ID=
export KAMATERA_API_SECRET=

Create a new directory named packer_tutorial and paste the following configuration into a file named kamatera-ubuntu.pkr.hcl:

packer {
  required_plugins {
    kamatera = {
      version = ">= 0.5.0"
      source  = "github.com/kamatera/kamatera"
    }
  }
}

source "kamatera" "ubuntu" {
  datacenter = "EU"
  ssh_username = "root"
  image_name = "ubuntu-example-packer-image"
  script = <<-EOF
    echo Creating example.txt &&\
    echo "Hello World" > example.txt
  EOF
}

build {
  sources = [
    "source.kamatera.ubuntu"
  ]
}

Change to the packer_tutorial directory and run the following commands to download the Kamatera plugin:

packer init .

Build the image:

packer build .

Please wait, this will take a while...

When done, log-in to Kamatera console and navigate to My Cloud -> Hard Disk Library. Choose zone EU and click on MY PRIVATE IMAGES - you should see the created image there.

You can now create a new server from this image, SSH into that server and run cat example.txt.

Creating Windows machine images

Windows machine images are supported but have to use the inline script argument instead of custom provisioners.

Following is an example of a windows image source configuration:

source "kamatera" "windows" {
  datacenter = "EU"
  image = "windows_server_2022_datacenter_64-bit"
  // windows images do not support SSH, this also prevents running any custom provisioners
  disable_ssh = true
  // ssh_user is still required even though it is not used
  ssh_username = "root"
  image_name = "windows-example-packer-image"
  // powershell script can be used to provision the server
  script = <<-EOF
    Write-Host "Hello World!"
    "Hello World" | Out-File -FilePath test.txt
  EOF
}

If you create a server using this configuration you should be able to find the created test.txt file on the server.