Hi Rickard, Thanks, that PR looks quite promising! Would you consider re-opening it?
I personally do not mind the extra time involved with launching a new instance and conducting the tests there. I considered running the tests within the packer instance, before creating the AMI, but our process makes it a little difficult... We use userdata to pivot /root to tmpfs (in memory), and then re-partition the root EBS volume and use chroot to complete the build. This is the only mechanism* we've found that allows us to re-partition the root volume and preserve the billing product code. So, I'm not sure what hurdles we'd run into getting the tests to execute against the chroot. (*Well, we could also chroot a secondary volume, then shutdown the instance, detach both root and secondary volumes, attach the secondary volume as root, and then create the image...but that is even more cumbersome and wouldn't address this problem.) Also, the tests are sometimes dependent on the instance type, such as validating that the image is supporting detection of the network interface speed at 10Gbps. So we'd likely want to launch a new instance anyway, possibly several, to test different scenarios. I can look into Terraform, also; I don't have any experience with it currently. Does it also handle the setup and teardown of resources around launching the instance, running some commands, and terminating the instance (i.e. create/delete keypair, security group, etc)? The EBS builder in Packer is _almost_ purpose-built for this...and there is already the null builder, which serves a sortof-similar use case. Cheers, -Loren On Wednesday, July 12, 2017 at 12:42:26 AM UTC-4, Rickard von Essen wrote: > > First see https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/4681 > > I have tried running serverspec for educational purposes with Packer. > First I thougth it should be a second step of a pipeline after > creating the AMI but after some considerations mostly about the time > it takes to launch a new instance and the overhead it adds I think > it's better to do the validation as the last step of your Packer > provisioning. You can eaither run serverspec localy on the instance > you are building or run it from the host running Packer. > > If you want a second step in your pipeline Terraform might be a better > option. > > // Rickard > > On 11 July 2017 at 20:07, Loren Gordon <lo...@fleet-it.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > Hello, > > I'd like to run tests using serverspec or testinfra against AMIs created > > using Packer. Is anyone doing something similar? > > > > I looked at testkitchen with kitchen-ec2, but it feels pretty weak when > it > > comes to setting up the AWS environment...for example, it doesn't create > the > > ssh keypair or the security group, and so of course doesn't clean them > up > > either. Meaning more setup/teardown that I'd have to manage myself. > Packer's > > support for such things is pretty great, so it occurred to me that > perhaps I > > could just use Packer to launch the instance and run the tests. However, > it > > appears that the ebs builder will _always_ create an AMI and for the > test > > run I wouldn't want another AMI. So I looked at the null builder, but > that > > seems like it would require me to manage all the same things as > > testkitchen/kitchen-ec2. > > > > I think, ideally, it would be handy if the ebs builder accepted > something > > like "null" as an option for the ami_name, or just make it optional > rather > > than required, indicating that the builder would not create an AMI or > any > > other artifacts. Would anyone else be interested in such a feature? > > > > Thanks, > > -Loren > > > > -- > > This mailing list is governed under the HashiCorp Community Guidelines - > > https://www.hashicorp.com/community-guidelines.html. Behavior in > violation > > of those guidelines may result in your removal from this mailing list. > > > > GitHub Issues: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues > > IRC: #packer-tool on Freenode > > --- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups > > "Packer" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an > > email to packer-tool...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > > To view this discussion on the web visit > > > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/packer-tool/a1ac442e-e6cb-4d8b-b2eb-9dc9f9716821%40googlegroups.com. > > > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- This mailing list is governed under the HashiCorp Community Guidelines - https://www.hashicorp.com/community-guidelines.html. Behavior in violation of those guidelines may result in your removal from this mailing list. 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