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How to use Packer with your Orka environment The Orka Packer Plugin works with Packer and lets you automate the creation of Orka golden images. Tired of manually configuring and building your Orka images? The Orka Packer plugin is a great tool to use for automating your image builds. Not only is it easy to use and a great addition to any CI/CD pipeline, it can be used with additional plugins, such as Jenkins. New to Orka? See how teams use it for CI/CD.
Current plugin release: v3.1.2.

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Before You Begin

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VPN connectivity

Make sure that your local environment is connected to your Orka environment through VPN. You can use a VPN client to establish temporary connectivity, or you can create a site-to-site VPN tunnel to keep the connection alive at all times.

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Service account token

The plugin requires an orka_auth_token to authenticate with your Orka cluster. This must be a service account token. Personal user tokens expire after one hour, which is typically not enough time for a full image build, and will cause builds to fail mid-run. Step 1: Create a service account
You only need to do this once. Use a descriptive name that makes the purpose of the account clear. Step 2: Generate a token
By default, service account tokens are valid for one year. Copy the token value from the output. Step 3: Store the token as a secret Store the token in your CI/CD platform’s secret manager (for example, GitHub Actions secrets, GitLab CI/CD variables, or Jenkins credentials). Name it ORKA_AUTH_TOKEN. Never commit the token value to your repository. Step 4: Reference the token in your Packer template Declare the variable so Packer reads it from your environment at build time:
Then pass the variable when running builds locally:
In CI/CD, the secret is injected automatically as an environment variable, so no extra steps are needed if you’ve named it ORKA_AUTH_TOKEN.

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Working with the Plugin

For latest information on installing the plugin, please visit Orka Packer Plugin Installation. For latest information on using the plugin, please visit Orka Packer Plugin Usage. For latest information on configuring the plugin, please visit Orka Packer Plugin Configuration.
If your build pushes the finished image to an OCI registry, packer_push_timeout controls how long Packer waits for that push before moving on (default 60 minutes); the push itself keeps running in the background past the timeout rather than failing. Increase it if you want Packer to wait for large images or slow registry connections to finish before exiting. See the configuration reference above for the full field list.
Looking for a working starting point? Ready-to-use Packer templates, including Tahoe and 200GB Sequoia/Tahoe variants, are available on OrkaHub. Find them in the packer-plugin-macstadium-orka repository and copy or adapt them for your own image builds.
Contributing: The Orka Packer Plugin is open-sourced under the GNU GPL v3 license.To raise an issue with the plugin feel free to describe it by opening a new issue in the Github repository. To contribute to the source code by fixing a bug or adding a feature, review the CONTRIBUTING guidelines.