Customizing Packer with Go Plugins

Automating machine image creation often requires custom logic that standard tools cannot provide. To build truly flexible infrastructure pipelines, you need to know how to extend your tooling to fit your exact workflow. This course guides you through the process of writing, compiling, and integrating your own custom plugins using Go to extend Packer's capabilities. You will start by mastering the fundamental architecture of Packer, understanding how it communicates with external binaries, and setting up a modern Go development environment. You will then progress to writing robust, testable plugin code, handling configuration decoding, and managing errors gracefully. By the end of this course, you will be able to build tailored provisioning workflows that fit seamlessly into any modern CI/CD pipeline. What you'll learn: - Understand the core architecture of Packer and how it interacts with external plugins - Configure a modern Go development environment tailored for plugin creation - Write custom Packer provisioner plugins from scratch using Go - Implement robust error handling and configuration parsing in your plugin code - Compile, install, and test your custom plugins locally - Apply modern testing practices using Go testing packages to ensure plugin stability This course begins with foundational concepts, key terminology, and API structures before moving into step-by-step development patterns. Through structured written explanations, clear code walkthroughs, and practical configuration examples, you will build a solid understanding of plugin development. This course is designed for software developers, DevOps engineers, and systems administrators who have a basic understanding of Packer and Go, and want to build custom automation tooling. No prior plugin development experience is required. Start writing your own custom plugins to unlock the full potential of your infrastructure automation.