packer-officeVM

What is it for?

Simply, in a couple of words. It converts Windows ISO file into vagrant's box.

Importance!

The primary goal of this project is to support vagrant-officeVM. These two projects forms one small ecosystem.

Requirements

There is only one requirement: packer.

Please download it and install on your own.

After install be sure, that packer.exe is accessible in PATH environment variable.

Usage tip

This project supports two hypervisors: Hyper-V and Virtualbox.

Choose the one you want. Detailed instructions are described at hyperv.md and virtualbox.md.

What's in the box:

• Windows installed,
• single user: vagrant with password vagrant,
• VirtualBox Guest additions installed,
• WinRM access enabled,
• Linux Subsystem for Windows installed,
• Developer Mode enabled,
• SSH Private/Public Keys may be uploaded. Read this to understand it.

Localization:

Setup file for Windows installer is localized. It contains some elements where strict region ID is specified. Autounattend.xml is located under a regional folder just to make a space for other languages.

Build operation supports additional argument locale to indicate wanted language. So it is possible to run:

PS packer-officeVM> .\build.ps1 <your-iso-file-path> -locale pl-PL

Supported languages it is a list of subfolders of the target Windows version folder.

Currently polish is the only one supported language :) (maybe for some time only). It's a default one also when no locale is provided.

SSH Keys support

windows-10.1607 template is not supported.

The rules of concept are simple:

• place your SSH keys at %USERPROFILE%\.ssh folder at host OS,
• take care of the content of the known_hosts file to ensure non-interactive connection success,
• the name of your SSH keys file should starts with id_,
• all files %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\id_* with known_hosts packer copies into the virtual floppy,
• after successful Windows installation all files A:\id_* and A:\known_hosts are copied to C:\Users\vagrant\.ssh folder.

That's all at this stage. The next steps should be done on vagrant up at Vagrantfile.

Remember, that your box contains your SSH Private Key. Do not share the box.

If you don't use SSH keys, then ignore it. Packer will ignore it also.

What you can do with uploaded SSH keys?

My real life examples:

1. Bash on Ubuntu on Windows - link uploaded .ssh folder with user profile and enjoy git with SSH authentication:

   ~ $ ln -s /mnt/c/Users/vagrant/.ssh .ssh

2. Git for Windows - %USERPROFILE% folder is also user profile folder within Git Bash. With SSH keys uploaded you can clone repositories using SSH protocol already on non-interactive provisioning.

3. Git for Windows Portable - the same as Git for Windows.