Practical Packer: Learn Hashicorp Packer with a Real Project

In this lecture, we jump right into the Packer code and find out exactly what this project does. You'll get comfortable reading through a simple Packer Template, and start learning some of the basic terminology.

In this lecture, you'll learn about the basic ideas you need to know to use Packer -- how to "think in Packer." At the end of this project, you'll know what every configuration block in a Packer Template does and why it's there.

In this lecture, we'll dive deeper into the main configuration blocks that make up the Packer Template you've seen. After this lecture, you'll understand where you would add additional modules and build configuration if you were modifying or building a template from scratch.

In this lecture, you'll get a tour of the Hands-On Linux WordPress configuration code and instructions. This is the kind of manually-configured project that you would start building a Packer project from, so it's the kind of real-life problem that you'll have to solve.

I walk you through the basics you need to know to orient yourself in the configuration code, so you understand why we'll make the choices we do in the Packer Template and project.

This is the "Packer Solution" for the WordPress configuration project you saw in the previous video. You'll see how (and learn WHY) I decomposed the project the way I did, and how it's organized as a Packer project. Then we'll walk step-by-step through what the Packer Template does.

In this lecture you'll see how to install Packer on various platforms. It's a simple process!

This lecture requires an AWS account. If you don't have one, you can sign up on the Amazon Web Services website.

In this lecture, I'll show you how to set up an EC2 SSH key that you can use to connect to the instances created from your Packer image.

In this lecture you'll learn how to create a basic IAM user to test this Packer code with.

Note: for real-life applications, you'll want to provision an IAM user with significantly fewer permissions, so it can *only* do what you need, and no more.

In this lecture, you'll run the Packer build for our project and create an AWS AMI (an Amazon compute machine image).

Note: this will create billable resources that cost money in AWS. Make sure to clean up everything after you're done with this course.

Now that you've used Packer to create an AMI (Amazon machine image), let's verify that this image works, and that we can use it to spin up one -- or a hundred -- WordPress hosting servers, ready to host websites.

Now that you're almost ready to embark on your own Packer projects, here's a tour of the documentation that you'll find yourself using as you create real-life Packer projects for all your DevOps needs.

You won't always be using AWS, or even building VM images. Packer can do SO MUCH that's useful in a DevOps "build" pipeline, and here I'll show you some of the plugins you're most likely to use: from GCP and Azure builders, to creating Docker images, working with cloud secrets, and more.

I want to leave you with some real-life project ideas that you can use to cement (and extend!) what you've learned in this course. It's REALLY IMPORTANT that you go out and do a small Packer project on your own, without instructions or tutorials. This will really cement the knowledge you've gained.

In this video I'll give several project ideas; some which are great for beginners and others which are ideal for more advanced engineers.

You've made it through the course! Congratulations! In this lecture, I leave you with some parting thoughts.