This project demonstrates usage of Packer with the new Ubuntu autoinstaller which was introduced in Ubuntu 20.04 while the classic Debian Installer (d-i) using preseed.conf files has been deprecated.

The example uses QEMU/KVM as Packer Builder; you might want to use Vagrant/VirtualBox/etc. instead.

The following tools need to be installed on your Linux build host to build this example project:

• Packer (example config tested with 1.8.0)
• QEMU/KVM

To build the VM with a QEMU window, run:

$ packer build ubuntu-22.04.json

For a headless build (CI, ...) set the is_headless variable:

$ packer build -var 'is_headless=true' ubuntu-22.04.json

Apparently Ubuntu needs a lot of resources while installing. Disk size under 5G or less than 1G RAM seems to result in crashes of the installer at various stages.

"disk_size": "5000M",
"memory": 2048,

Packer seems to have a bug that aborts the VM build after 2-5 minutes regardless of the ssh_timeout setting. As a workaround, set ssh_handshake_attempts to a high value.

"ssh_timeout": "60m",            # ignored!?
"ssh_handshake_attempts": 420    # workaround

Display gtk doesn't work on my system, YMMV.

"display": "sdl",

• Ubuntu autoinstall documentation: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/install/autoinstall
• https://www.molnar-peter.hu/en/ubuntu-jammy-netinstall-pxe.html

MIT

• Jeff Geerling for his Packer Boxes project which helped me a lot getting started with local VM builds using Packer some years ago
• Molnár Péter for his excellent blog post about Ubuntu's autoinstaller