# Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas

> Explore hassle-free Vagrant box creation with Packer in Atlas. Harness the power of seamless integration for efficient box building and management.

- Canonical: https://www.russ.cloud/2015/07/26/building-vagrant-boxes-with-packer-in-atlas/
- Published: 2015-07-26
- Author: Russ McKendrick
- Tags: Tools, Packer

---

I have a need to create both some Ubuntu and CentOS Vagrant boxes for a project I am working on.

Normally I would have created them on my local machine, uploaded the artifacts to an Amazon S3 bucket and then published them using [Atlas](https://atlas.hashicorp.com "Atlas website") (formally [Vagrant Cloud](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search?utm_source=vagrantcloud.com&vagrantcloud=1)).

However in the past month [HashiCorp](https://hashicorp.com "HashiCorp site") have updated Atlas so that you can now build [Packer](https://packer.io "Packer") templates directly within Atlas and publish the artifacts as Vagrant Boxes, all free of charge. This is great for me as it means that I will not incur the hosting and distribution costs.

#### Getting started

If you haven’t already [sign up for an Atlas account](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/account/new). I would recommend that you immediately [enable two factor authentication](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/settings/security) just incase.

#### Installing Packer & Vagrant

As I am 100% Mac based these instructions only cover installing Packer & Vagrant using [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/).

For the Atlas interaction you need to make sure you are using the latest versions of both pieces of software, at the time of writing these are;

- Packer 0.8.2
- Vagrant 1.7.4

First of all, ensure Homebrew is up-to-date;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 1/9"
brew update
```


Once updated you can install the software by using;

```text frame="terminal"
brew install packer
brew install cask
brew cask install vagrant
```

Finally, check the versions you have installed;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 2/9"
⚡ packer version
Packer v0.8.2
```


and;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 3/9"
⚡ vagrant version
Installed Version: 1.7.4
Latest Version: 1.7.4
```


You’re running an up-to-date version of Vagrant!

#### Getting a token

Now you have signed up and have the latest versions of Packer & Vagrant installed you will need to generate a token, this will allow Packer to interact with Atlas.

You can get a token from your [settings page](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/settings/tokens).

<Img src="/assets/2015-07-26-building-vagrant-boxes-with-packer-in-atlas/img/2015-07-26_building-vagrant-boxes-with-packer-in-atlas_1.png" alt="tokens-for-russmckendrick-atlas-by-hashicorp" />

(yes, the token above has been revoked so you can’t use it)

As the message on the page says, make a copy of your token as you will not be able to see it again. Once you have your access token you will need to set it as a environment variable;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 4/9"
export ATLAS_TOKEN=”axYdYYAte8MGqw.atlasv1.n3pj1oC9qQq4DRbPxykJy3pSHlDoFzfsBkGTrEqq3WWZarX8tuaHjr1gkdenRAazdLo”
```


#### Packer

For this part of the blog post you can use [my templates](https://github.com/russmckendrick/vagrant/), you can grab them from GitHub using;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 5/9"
git clone https://github.com/russmckendrick/vagrant.git
```


Lets use the CentOS 7.1 template, open centos7.json in your text editor of choice and update [the variables at the bottom of the file](https://github.com/russmckendrick/vagrant/blob/master/centos71.json#L111-L116) replacing the atlas_username, atlas_name and artifactversion as needed.

Next up should use packer validate to check there are not any errors with the template file;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 6/9"
⚡ packer validate centos71.json
Template validated successfully.
```


Once you have validated the template you will need to push the template to Atlas using packer push;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 7/9"
⚡ packer push -m “Initial Push” centos71.json
Push successful to ‘russmckendrick/centos71’
```


Once the template has been pushed you should [see the build in the web interface](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/builds);

<Img src="/assets/2015-07-26-building-vagrant-boxes-with-packer-in-atlas/img/2015-07-26_building-vagrant-boxes-with-packer-in-atlas_2.png" alt="build-configuration-russmckendrick-centos71-atlas-by-hashicorp" />

The CentOS 7.1 build takes around 45 minutes to complete.

#### Vagrant

Once the build has completed the artifact will be automatically uploaded to Atlas using the variables you defined earlier in the post. You can view your [Vagrant Boxes in the web interface.](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/vagrant)

Once completed you will be able to use the boxes with the commands which accompany the release e.g.

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 8/9"
vagrant init russmckendrick/centos71; vagrant up - provider virtualbox
```


or for VMWare;

```bash frame="terminal" title="Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas 9/9"
vagrant init russmckendrick/centos71; vagrant up - provider vmware_fusion
```


Remember to wait until the build has completed the version is labelled as released before trying to use the box.

#### Trouble Shooting

One the problems I came across when converting my existing Packer templates to using the Atlas Post-Processor was that I didn’t next the arrays, this resulted in problems with the metadata for the box being correctly embedded which caused errors when trying to launch the box.

The problem is detailed [this GitHub issue](https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/2090).