Experimenting with GitHub Actions for building machine images with Packer

Packer with GitHub Actions

Experimenting with GitHub Actions for building machine images with Packer. Ideally trying to figure out what it takes for building the following on GitHub Actions:

• VirtualBox ISO
• Hyper-V ISO
• Docker Image

Docker Image

A base case. I want to confirm that I am in fact able to use packer without issue on GitHub Actions.

HyperV

I have had to do some work with Windows containers recently, and have found them to have performance issues for disk intense work. I was curious, if some of the provisioning scripts for the docker container could be used in a HyperV machine. That would allow for some performance experimentation between the two types.

VirtualBox

One of my previous projects involved using Vagrant to provision desktop environments. The problem with those environments is that the provisioning process was not hermetic. Building the same commit a month apart could result in significantly different images, or even failures. This was not ideal, so I wanted to investigate building images (ISOs) and using the Vagrantfile for environment configuration (e.g. ISO = environment, Vagrantfile = how you connect to this environment).

At the time I didn’t like the available options for CI/CD, so decided to shelve the idea for now. With GitHub Actions, I’m curious if I would be able to build these images, then deploy them to something like VagrantCloud.