RHEL9 BASE AMI

Provides a base template for Packer and Ansible based AMI builds.

Ansible

All Ansible configuration resides in the ./ansible directory. The Ansible configuration will be called during the provisioning step of the Packer build as defined in ./packer/build.pkr.hcl.

This template provides the basic code layout and structure only.

Development

For convenience development scripts have been supplied and are as follows:

Script	Description
inventory_aws_ec2.yml	Defines a dynamic inventory for Ansible by way of the aws_ec2 plugin
print-inventory	Prints the inventory hosts for debugging purposes
run-ansible	Runs the playbook against the configured hosts. Note: This requires Ansible be installed on the host system
variables.json	A means of specifying additional variables. Note: These values should never be committed and as such this file has been added to .gitignore

Packer Variables

All Packer configuration resides in the ./packer directory and utilises standard Packer configuration syntax.

The template provides the following variables to control the Packer build and provisioning process.

Variable	Type	Default	Description
ami_account_ids	string	-	A list of account IDs that have access to launch the resulting AMI(s).
ami_name_prefix	string	-	Prefix used for the name tags of resulting AMIs. The version will be appended to this.
aws_instance_type	string	t3.small	AWS EC2 instance type used when building the AMI.
aws_region	string	eu-west-2	The region in which the AMI will be built.
aws_source_ami_filter_name	string	amzn2-base-*	Source AMI filter string as per the DescribeImages API documentation. If multiple match, the latest image will be used.
aws_source_ami_owner_id	string	-	The source AMI owner ID. Used in combination with aws_source_ami_filter_name to match the source AMI.
aws_subnet_filter_name	string	-	Subnet filter string as per the DescribeSubnets API documentation. If multiple match, the subnet with the greatest number of IPv4 addresses will be used.
configuration_group	string	unnamed	The name of the group to which to add the instance for configuration purposes
data_volume_size_gib	number	-	The EC2 instance data volume size in Gibibytes (GiB)
force_delete_snapshot	bool	false	Automatically delete snapshots associated with AMIs deregistered by force_deregister.
force_deregister	bool	false	Deregister an existing AMI if one with the same name exists.
playbook_file_path	string	../ansible/playbook.yml	Relative path to the Ansible playbook file.
root_volume_size_gb	number	20	The EC2 instance root volume size in Gibibytes (GiB).
ssh_private_key_file	string	/home/packer/.ssh/packer-builder	The path to the common Packer builder private SSH key.
ssh_username	string	centos	The username Packer will use when connecting with SSH.
version	string	-	Semantic version number for the AMI. Will be automatically appended to ami_name_prefix to tag the resulting AMI and snapshots.