BOSH provisioner allows to provision VM by specifying regular BOSH deployment manifest.

You might also be interested in vagrant-bosh.

1. Run go get github.com/cppforlife/packer-bosh to download packer-bosh. Make sure to run git submodule update --init from inside packer-bosh directory.

2. Configure Packer's $HOME/.packerconfig to know about packer-bosh executable:

{
  "provisioners": {
    "packer-bosh": "/your-bin-dir/packer-bosh"
  }
}

See Packer core configuration for more details on how to configure custom provisioners.

2. Add new provisioning step to your template.json. For example:

{
  ...

  "provisioners": [{
    "type": "packer-bosh",
    "manifest_path": "example-bosh-lite-manifest.yml",
    "assets_dir": "/your-go-dir/src/github.com/cppforlife/packer-bosh/bosh-provisioner/assets",
    "ssh_password": "ubuntu"
  }]
}

See dev/template-vbox-*.json for example using VirtualBox.

3. Create a deployment manifest and specify it via manifest_path option. See dev/example-bosh-manifest.yml for an example deployment manifest used to deploy BOSH Director with BOSH Warden CPI.

4. Run packer build to build a VM

• manifest_path (String, default: nil) should contain path to a full BOSH deployment manifest

• assets_dir (String, default: nil) should contain path to directory with bosh-provisioner assets

• ssh_password (String, default: nil) should contain password of SSH user to run sudo; can be empty if password-less sudo is configured

• full_stemcell_compatibility (Boolean, default: false) forces provisioner to install all (not just minimum) dependencies usually found on a stemcell

• agent_infrastructure (String, default: warden) configures BOSH Agent infrastructure (e.g. aws, openstack)

• agent_platform (String, default: ubuntu) configures BOSH Agent platform (e.g. ubuntu, centos)

• agent_configuration (Hash, default: '{ ... }')

See building AWS Stemcell.