WARNING! Running this Packer build will for sure incur some (albeit barely a couple of US dollars at the time of writing this book) charges on your AWS account due to usage of non-free instance type, snapshot use, and AMI use, some possibly recurring. Refer to the pricing documentation of AWS for those services to estimate the amount that you will be charged. As an additional note, it is also good practice to clean up everything either from the console or CLI after you finish working with AWS objects that will not be kept around since it will ensure that you do not get additional charges after working with this code.
With the packer.json in place, we can now do a build of our image. We will first install the pre-requisites (python-boto and awscli), then check the access, and finally build our AMI:
$ # Install python-boto as it is a prerequisite for Amazon builders
$ # Also get awscli to check if credentials have been set correctly
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python-boto awscli
<snip>
$ # Check that AWS API credentials are properly set.
$ # If you see errors, consult the previous section on how to do this
$ aws ec2 describe-volumes
{
"Volumes": [
]
}
$ # Go to the proper directory if we are not in it
$ cd ~/ansible_deployment
$ # Build our AMI and use standardized output format
$ packer build -machine-readable packer.json
<snip>
1509439711,,ui,say,==> amazon-ebs: Provisioning with shell script: /tmp/packer-shell105349087
<snip>
1509439739,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: Setting up ansible (2.0.0.2-2ubuntu1) ...
1509439741,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: Setting up python-selinux (2.4-3build2) ...
1509439744,,ui,say,==> amazon-ebs: Provisioning with Ansible...
1509439744,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: Uploading Playbook directory to Ansible staging directory...
<snip>
1509439836,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: TASK [swarm_node : Installing Docker] ******************************************
1509439855,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: [0;33mchanged: [127.0.0.1][0m
1509439855,,ui,message, amazon-ebs:
1509439855,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
1509439855,,ui,message, amazon-ebs: [0;33m127.0.0.1[0m : [0;32mok[0m[0;32m=[0m[0;32m10[0m [0;33mchanged[0m[0;33m=[0m[0;33m9[0m unreachable=0 failed=0
1509439855,,ui,message, amazon-ebs:
1509439855,,ui,say,==> amazon-ebs: Stopping the source instance...
<snip>
1509439970,,ui,say,Build 'amazon-ebs' finished.
1509439970,,ui,say,--> amazon-ebs: AMIs were created: us-west-1: ami-a694a8c6
Success! With this new image ID that you can see at the end of the output (ami-a694a8c6), we can now launch instances in EC2 with this AMI and they will have all the tweaks we have applied as well as have Docker pre-installed!