nomad/e2e/terraform/packer

Packer Builds

These builds are run as-needed to update the AMIs used by the end-to-end test infrastructure.

What goes here?

• steps that aren't specific to a given Nomad build: ex. all Linux instances need jq and awscli.
• steps that aren't specific to a given EC2 instance: nothing that includes an IP address.
• steps that infrequently change: the version of Consul or Vault we ship.

How is this used?

The AMIs built by these Packer configs are tagged with BuilderSha, which has the value of the most recent commit that touched this directory.

The nightly E2E job runs a script to see if there are any AMIs that match the most recent commit that touched this directory, and if there aren't it will then build the AMIs. Then most recent AMI with a matching SHA is used for the nightly E2E run.

If you are changing this directory to build an AMI for testing, it's recommended that you change the name of the AMI or make sure that you've locally committed your changes so that your test AMI doesn't get picked up in the next nightly E2E run.

Running Packer builds

$ packer --version
1.6.4

# build Ubuntu Jammy AMI
$ ./build ubuntu-jammy-amd64

Debugging Packer Builds

To debug a Packer build you'll need to pass the -debug and -on-error flags. You can then ssh into the instance using the ec2_amazon-ebs.pem file that Packer drops in this directory.

Packer doesn't have a cleanup command if you've run -on-error=abort. So when you're done, clean up the machine by looking for "Packer" in the AWS console:

• EC2 instances
• Key pairs
• Security groups

Q: What About Windows?

For now, we're using an Amazon base image directly.