Parallels Plugin

Components

The Parallels Packer Plugin is able to create Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines and export them in the PVM format.

The plugin comes with multiple builders able to create Parallels machines, depending on the strategy you want to use to build the image. Packer supports the following Parallels builders:

• parallels-iso - Starts from an ISO file, creates a brand new Parallels VM, installs an OS, provisions software within the OS, then exports that machine to create an image. This is best for people who want to start from scratch.

• parallels-pvm - This builder imports an existing PVM file, runs provisioners on top of that VM, and exports that machine to create an image. This is best if you have an existing Parallels VM export you want to use as the source. As an additional benefit, you can feed the artifact of this builder back into itself to iterate on a machine.

Requirements

In addition to Parallels Desktop for Mac this requires the Parallels Virtualization SDK.

The SDK can be installed by downloading and following the instructions in the dmg.

Parallels Desktop for Mac 9 and later is supported, from PD 11 Pro or Business edition is required.

Installation

Using pre-built releases

Using the packer init command

Starting from version 1.7, Packer supports a new packer init command allowing automatic installation of Packer plugins. Read the Packer documentation for more information.

To install this plugin, copy and paste this code into your Packer configuration . Then, run packer init.

packer {
  required_plugins {
    parallels = {
      version = ">= 1.0.0"
      source  = "github.com/hashicorp/parallels"
    }
  }
}

Manual installation

You can find pre-built binary releases of the plugin here. Once you have downloaded the latest archive corresponding to your target OS, uncompress it to retrieve the plugin binary file corresponding to your platform. To install the plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

From Source

If you prefer to build the plugin from its source code, clone the GitHub repository locally and run the command go build from the root directory. Upon successful compilation, a packer-plugin-parallels plugin binary file can be found in the root directory. To install the compiled plugin, please follow the official Packer documentation on installing a plugin.