packer-plugin-cue

A packer plugin that writes files to the image you're provisioning, based on values extracted from a CUE module.

A Packer data provider is TODO.

Provided Plugins

Provisioners:

• cue-export - Given a module, package, and an optional CUE expression, the provisioner writes a file with the scalar value or struct yielded by cue export.

Example Usage

Add this plugin to required_plugins

packer {
  required_plugins {
    cue = {
      version = ">=0.3.1"
      source = "github.com/dontlaugh/cue"
    }
  }
}

Write the data yielded by the expression world in package hello to /tmp/some-file

  provisioner "cue-export" {
    dir        = "."
    package    = "hello"
    expression = "world"
    dest       = "/tmp/some-file"
  }

Config Attributes

Provisioners:

cue-export

• dir - path to where the CUE evaluation should take place
• module - (optional) name of module
• package - (optional) package name, if required to disambiguate
• expression - (optional) CUE expression that yields a specific package value
• dest - path to destination file; Note that some Packer builders will not automatically create ancestor directories.
• tags - (optional) list of strings of the form key=value

Explanation

Let's say you have a CUE module with a file my_service.cue that looks like this

package systemd

config_file: "/etc/my-service/config.yaml"

unit_file: '''
[Unit]
Description=My example service

[Service]
Environment=MY_CONFIG=\(config_file)
ExecStart=/usr/bin/my-service

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
'''

Invoking cue export -p systemd ./my_service.cue gives you the entire package as JSON

{
    "config_file": "/etc/my-service/config.yaml",
    "unit_file": "W1VuaXRdCkRlc2N...=="
}

Note: We've elided most of the unit file's base64 string here.

Providing --out binary and -e unit_file lets us select the unit_file field and render it. The value of config_file is interpolated.

$ cue export -p systemd -e unit_file --out binary ./my_service.cue
[Unit]
Description=My example service

[Service]
Environment=MY_CONFIG=/etc/my-service/config.yaml
ExecStart=/usr/bin/my-service

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This manner of templating files and interpolating values is useful for machine image provisioning, and this plugin provides a declarative API for rendering CUE to files during a Packer build.

The previous examples use the cue CLI, which you should definitely download and experiment with if you are unfamiliar with CUE. This plugin, however, uses CUE as a Go library.

But wait, there's more!

The cue-export provisioner doesn't need a string or binary template to write files. If the package (with optional expression) evaluates to a string, number, or struct type, this plugin does the following

• String and number types are written as a single-line file to dest
• Struct types must be given a serialize config, one of "json", "yaml", or "toml". The entire struct will be serialized in tha format.

A quick example of a struct rendered to yaml

provisioner "cue-export" {
    module     = "."
    dir        = "."
    package    = "prometheus"
    expression = "config_yaml"
    serialize  = "yaml"
    dest       = "/tmp/prometheus.yaml"
}

If your expression evaluates to a struct and no serializer is set, it's an error.