packer-images

A repository containing a number of packer build configurations to generate Jenkins agent templates for all the Jenkins controllers of the jenkins-infra project, such as ci.jenkins.io, infra.ci.jenkins.io, etc.

Contributing

If you have:

• Any question about this repository, please ask us on the IRC channel at #jenkins-infra or on https://community.jenkins.io

• A problem, a feature request or an unwanted behavior with this code or its artifacts, please open an issue on the GitHub issue tracker of this repository.

• A contribution to make, please fork the GitHub repository to your own account, create a named branch and open a Pull Request with your proposed change/fix

  • Commit messages should follow Conventional Commits messages
  • If your PR is not associated to an issue (JIRA, GitHub), there is not guarantee that we will read or review it: please write a message explaining the intent in this case.

Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment

Continuous Integration

Each commit or pull request of this repository is built on https://infra.ci.jenkins.io, a non-public Jenkins controller.

• Anyone can read the feedback from the build on the public GitHub checks + status checks of the repository.
• Unless you are an administrator, the builds must be passing.

Continuous Delivery

Each build creates a set of artifacts (VM templates) for each cell of the build matrix (check the Jenkinsfile_k8s manifest) that are considered ephemeral:

1. The artifacts created by local builds (if you have the cloud credentials), Pull requests or named branch (except main) generate ephemeral artifacts tagged as dev with a lifespan of ~24h. They should never be used on production instances, they can be used for smoke testing and are not expected to be persisted.

2. The artifacts created by builds on the main branch are tagged as staging with a lifespan of 7 days. They can be used for validation on production instances but are not met to be persisted.

Continuous Deployment

Releases are created by adding a tag on the repository, which:

• must follow Semantic Versioning v2
• can be created either manually or automatically: there are no predefined planning
• triggers a build on Jenkins that will generate artifacts tagged as prod (for production usage, with a lifespan of 3 month unless still used)
• indirectly triggers Pull Requests on downstream repository (through their respective updatecli or dependabot configuration) if created successfully.

Please note that the different artifacts have different versioning schemes, depending on the compute provider:

• AWS AMIs generates objects with an ID and a name, and additionally, the build type (dev, staging or prod) and git tag are added as metadatas
• Azure VM templates are using Shared Image Galleries where the git tag maps 1:1 to a new version of an image

Invoking the build locally

In some cases, you might want to execute the build locally (opposed to opening a Pull Request and delegate the build to the CI/CD system).

Requirements

• A shell (sh, bash, ash, zsh) prompt
• Packer (check template's version constraints to know which version to use)
• Define the environment variables PKR_VAR_* to the target you want to build (hint: look at the Jenkinsfile or to the variable blocks in the packer template HCL files)
• Configure all the clouds (defined by the possible values of the variable PKR_VAR_image_type) credentials (e.g. API key, or clouds own CLI access such as az or aws commands))
• Ensure that you have a Docker Engine available

With the requirements verified locally, execute the following command:

• Define the target to build:

# Means: "Build the ubuntu-20.04 agent for Docker
export PKR_VAR_image_type=docker
export PKR_VAR_agent_os_type=ubuntu
export PKR_VAR_agent_os_version=20.04

• Validate the template:

packer validate ./

• Build only one template (example: Docker Ubuntu):

packer build -timestamp-ui -force -only="docker.ubuntu" ./

Azure

• Retrieve the resource group name from the source to build in the template files (directive managed_image_resource_group_name).

• Create a new resource group on your account with this retrieved values

az group create -n myResourceGroup -l eastus

• Define the cloud credentials with the 3 additional environment variables PKR_VAR_subscription_id, PKR_VAR_client_id and PKR_VAR_client_secret