Packer templates for building TRE AMIs
HIC build AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) for use in the HIC TRE using Packer. These AMIs are all very similar so we've written some tools to make it easier to template them.
You must install Packer and Python 3. You will also need access to an AWS account.
If you are using a recent version of Packer you may also need to install the Amazon plugin:
packer plugins install github.com/hashicorp/amazon
Two example configurations are provided in the configs directory, one for Windows 2019 and one for Ubuntu 22.04 desktop.
To generate the packer pkr.hcl files run
make packer
This runs the j2-templater.py script which takes a configuration YAML file from ./configs/ and outputs the pkr.hcl file under ./builds/.
To build all AMIs run
make images
If successful this will output a <CONFIG>-manifest.json file under ./builds/ for each input configuration.
To build a single AMI, e.g. for ./configs/hic-windows-2019-example.yml, run
make builds/hic-windows-2019-example-manifest.json
The modules under ./modules/ are used by the packer templates to build the AMIs.
Some of these install commercial software that is either free, or requires a license.
You are responsible for checking the requirements.
In some cases secret variables are required to use some modules, e.g. registration keys, or an AWS S3 bucket containing the software installer.