Packer build for a NetBox VM image using QEMU/KVM.

Produces a sparse qcow2 image based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with cloud-init enabled for post-deploy customization.

• NetBox (latest) installed from source with gunicorn WSGI server
• PostgreSQL with a pre-configured netbox database and user
• Redis for caching and task queuing
• nginx as a reverse proxy
• systemd services for NetBox, NetBox RQ worker, and all dependencies
• Cloud-init remains enabled for hostname, network, and user configuration at deploy time

• Packer >= 1.10
• QEMU with KVM support
• xorriso (for cloud-init seed ISO generation)

packer init .
packer build .

The output image is written to output/netbox-ubuntu-24.04.qcow2.

Override variables with -var:

packer build -var 'disk_size=64G' -var 'netbox_version=4.5.5' .

The image is a standard qcow2 that can be deployed to any KVM/QEMU hypervisor (Proxmox, libvirt, OpenStack, etc.).

Cloud-init runs on first boot. Provide a user-data config to set hostname, users, network, etc.

Example with libvirt/virt-install:

# Resize disk if needed
qemu-img resize netbox-ubuntu-24.04.qcow2 64G

# Boot with cloud-init
virt-install \
  --name netbox \
  --memory 4096 \
  --vcpus 2 \
  --import \
  --disk netbox-ubuntu-24.04.qcow2 \
  --cloud-init user-data=user-data.yml \
  --os-variant ubuntu24.04

1. Create a NetBox superuser:

   sudo /opt/netbox/create-superuser.sh

2. Change the database password in both PostgreSQL and the NetBox config:

   sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER netbox WITH PASSWORD 'new-secure-password';"
   sudo sed -i "s/'PASSWORD': 'netbox'/'PASSWORD': 'new-secure-password'/" /opt/netbox/netbox/netbox/configuration.py
   sudo systemctl restart netbox netbox-rq

3. Access NetBox at http://<vm-ip>/

.
├── main.pkr.hcl           # Packer build definition
├── variables.pkr.hcl      # Configurable variables
├── http/
│   ├── meta-data           # Cloud-init metadata (build-time)
│   └── user-data           # Cloud-init userdata (build-time)
└── scripts/
    ├── 01-update.sh        # System update and dependencies
    ├── 02-postgresql.sh    # PostgreSQL install and DB setup
    ├── 03-redis.sh         # Redis install
    ├── 04-netbox.sh        # NetBox from source, systemd services
    ├── 05-nginx.sh         # nginx reverse proxy
    └── 99-cleanup.sh       # Cleanup, reset cloud-init

MIT