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Amazon AMI Builder

Type: amazon-ebs

The amazon-ebs builder is able to create Amazon AMIs backed by EBS volumes for use in EC2. The builder takes an initial source AMI, runs any provisioning necesary on the instance, and snapshots it into a reusable AMI.

Amazon supports two types of AMIs: EBS-backed and instance-store. Instance store AMIs are considerably harder to create, requiring many platform-specific steps that can often take a very long time. EBS-backed AMIs, on the hand, only require a source AMI to exist. This builder only builds EBS-backed instances, because they are easier to create, especially across many platforms running Packer.

This builder builds an AMI by launching an EC2 instance from a source AMI, provisioning that running machine, and then creating an AMI from that machine. This is all done in your own AWS account. The builder will create temporary keypairs, security group rules, etc. that provide it temporary access to the instance while the image is being created. This simplifies configuration quite a bit.

The builder does not manage AMIs. Once it creates an AMI and stores it in your account, it is up to you to use, delete, etc. the AMI.

Configuration Reference

There are many configuration options available for the builder. They are segmented below into two categories: required and optional parameters. Within each category, the available configuration keys are alphabetized.

Required:

• access_key (string) - The access key used to communicate with AWS. If not specified, Packer will attempt to read this from environmental variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID or AWS_ACCESS_KEY (in that order).

• ami_name (string) - The name of the resulting AMI that will appear when managing AMIs in the AWS console or via APIs. This must be unique. To help make this unique, certain template parameters are available for this value, which are documented below.

• instance_type (string) - The EC2 instance type to use while building the AMI, such as "m1.small".

• region (string) - The name of the region, such as "us-east-1", in which to launch the EC2 instance to create the AMI.

• secret_key (string) - The secret key used to communicate with AWS. If not specified, Packer will attempt to read this from environmental variables AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY or AWS_SECRET_KEY (in that order).

• source_ami (string) - The initial AMI used as a base for the newly created machine.

• ssh_username (string) - The username to use in order to communicate over SSH to the running machine.

Optional:

• security_group_id (string) - The ID (not the name) of the security group to assign to the instance. By default this is not set and Packer will automatically create a new temporary security group to allow SSH access. Note that if this is specified, you must be sure the security group allows access to the ssh_port given below.

• ssh_port (int) - The port that SSH will be available on. This defaults to port 22.

• ssh_timeout (string) - The time to wait for SSH to become available before timing out. The format of this value is a duration such as "5s" or "5m". The default SSH timeout is "1m", or one minute.

Basic Example

Here is a basic example. It is completely valid except for the access keys:

{
  "type": "amazon-ebs",
  "access_key": "YOUR KEY HERE",
  "secret_key": "YOUR SECRET KEY HERE",
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "source_ami": "ami-de0d9eb7",
  "instance_type": "t1.micro",
  "ssh_username": "ubuntu",
  "ami_name": "packer-quick-start {{.CreateTime}}"
}

Note: Packer can also read the access key and secret access key from environmental variables. See the configuration reference in the section above for more information on what environmental variables Packer will look for.

AMI Name Variables

The AMI name specified by the ami_name configuration variable is actually treated as a configuration template. Packer provides a set of variables that it will replace within the AMI name. This helps ensure the AMI name is unique, as AWS requires.

The available variables are shown below:

• CreateTime - This will be replaced with the Unix timestamp of when the AMI was built.