Building CAPI Images for Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Prerequisites

Create Service Account

From your google cloud console, follow these instructions to create a new service account with Editor permissions. Thereafter, generate a JSON Key and store it somewhere safe.

Use cloud shell to install Ansible, Packer and proceed with building the CAPI compliant VM image.

Install Ansible and Packer

Start by launching the google cloud shell.

# Export the GCP project id you want to build images in
$ export GCP_PROJECT_ID=<project-id>

# Export the path to the service account credentials created in the step above
$ export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=</path/to/serviceaccount-key.json>

# If you don't have the image-builder repository
$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder.git

$ cd image-builder/images/capi/
# Run the target make deps-gce to install Ansible and Packer
$ make deps-gce

Run the Make target to generate GCE images.

From images/capi directory, run make build-gce-ubuntu-<version> command depending on which ubuntu version you want to build the image for.

For instance, to build an image for ubuntu 24.04, run

$ make build-gce-ubuntu-2404

To build all gce ubuntu images, run

make build-gce-all

Configuration

The gce sub-directory inside images/capi/packer stores JSON configuration files for Ubuntu OS.

File	Description
`ubuntu-2004.json`	Settings for Ubuntu 20.04 image
`ubuntu-2204.json`	Settings for Ubuntu 22.04 image
`ubuntu-2404.json`	Settings for Ubuntu 24.04 image
`rhel-8.json`	Settings for RHEL 8 image

This table lists several common options that a user may want to set via PACKER_VAR_FILES to customize their build behavior. This is not an exhaustive list, and greater explanation can be found in the Packer documentation for the Google Cloud Platform builder.

Variable	Description	Default
`zone`	The GCP zone in which to launch the VM instance.	`null`
`project_id`	The GCP project ID for the deployment.	`${GCP_PROJECT_ID}`
`machine_type`	The machine type to use for the VM instance (e.g., n1-standard-1, n2-standard-2, etc.).	`"n1-standard-1"`

The parameters can be set via variable file and the use of PACKER_VAR_FILES. See Customization for examples.

List Images

List all images by running the following command in the console

$ gcloud compute images list --project ${GCP_PROJECT_ID} --no-standard-images

NAME                                         PROJECT            FAMILY                      DEPRECATED  STATUS
cluster-api-ubuntu-2404-v1-17-11-1603233313  myregistry-292303  capi-ubuntu-2404-k8s-v1-17              READY
cluster-api-ubuntu-2004-v1-17-11-1603233874  myregistry-292303  capi-ubuntu-2004-k8s-v1-17              READY

Delete Images

To delete images from gcloud shell, run following

$ gcloud compute images delete [image 1] [image2]

where [image 1] and [image 2] refer to the names of the images to be deleted.

The Image Builder Book