How To Install packer on Debian 9
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install packer
on Debian 9.
What is packer
packer is:
Packer is a CLI tool for the automatic creation of identical machine images (single deployable units that contain a pre-configured OS and installed software) for multiple platforms (public cloud providers, private cloud and desktop virtualization solutions) from a single JSON template resp. configuration file.
Packer features builders for the following target platforms which could be employed on Debian:
- Amazon Web Services (EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images for EC2, and other types)
- Microsoft Azure (VHDs in the Azure Resource Manager)
- DigitalOcean (reuseable snapshots from available source images)
- Docker
- Google Compute Engine (images based on existing images)
- OpenStack (new reuseable images for servers in OpenStack clouds)
- QEMU (KVM and Xen virtual machine images)
- Oracle VirtualBox (virtual machine images)
A number of post-processors are included like for creating Vagrant boxes.
Several provisioners resp. remote execution systems, namely Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, and shell based provisioning (using SSH) are supported to configure and install software on the machines automatically after fresh OSs have been set up. Provisioning Windows machines via Windows shell and PowerShell is included (using WinRM).
For the documentation of Packer, please see https://www.packer.io/docs.
There are three methods to install packer
on Debian 9. We can use apt-get
, apt
and aptitude
. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install packer Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get
using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install packer
using apt-get
by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install packer
Install packer Using apt
Update apt database with apt
using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install packer
using apt
by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install packer
Install packer Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude
using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install packer
using aptitude
by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install packer
How To Uninstall packer on Debian 9
To uninstall only the packer
package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove packer
Uninstall packer And Its Dependencies
To uninstall packer
and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 9, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove packer
Remove packer Configurations and Data
To remove packer
configuration and data from Debian 9 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge packer
Remove packer configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove packer
configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge packer
Dependencies
packer have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install packer
package on Debian 9 using different package management tools: apt
, apt-get
and aptitude
.