Kali-Packer-Vagrant

Introduction

This project provides Packer and Vagrant configuration and supporting scripts for Kali Linux, to allow the creation of both standard Kali VMs and Vagrant boxes. Both VMware and Virtualbox are supported.

This project also leverages two libraries of Ansible roles I maintain, to configure a number of common tools:

• https://github.com/NJonesUK/ansible-collection-security for security-focused tools
• https://github.com/NJonesUK/ansible-collection-dev for more general utilities

Caveats

Currently this produces VMs with the kali standard credentials of kali and kali. This user has passwordless sudo access, in order to facilitate the ansible provisioners for both Packer and Vagrant. Once the box is built, the sudo configuration should be updated to enforce a password for sudo.

Requirements

• Packer - https://www.packer.io
• Virtualization Software
  • Virtualbox and the extension pack - https://www.virtualbox.org
  • VMware Workstation
• (optionally) Vagrant - https://www.vagrantup.com
  • If using VMware, you'll also need a license to the Vagrant VMware plugin.

Usage

Make sure to clone with --recurse-submodules to pull down all the Ansible roles too.

To build the virtual machine for both VMware and VirtualBox, run the following command: packer build packer.json

To only build one or the other packer build -only=vmware-iso packer.json packer build -only=virtualbox-iso packer.json

Other useful flags for packer:

• -force will override previous output (i.e overwrite boxes you'd built in previous runs)
• -on-error=ask will pause execution if there's an error in one of the provisioners, allowing you to jump into the still running VM and investigate
• -timestamp-ui will add timestamps to every output line

Vagrant

To build the Vagrant box, specify the packer-vagrant.json config file instead.

To add the resulting Vagrant box to your local Vagrant installation, use the following command: vagrant box add --name kalirolling builds/virtualbox-kali.box The --force flag can be used to overwrite a previously built box with the same name.

To instantiate a VM with Vagrant using the box you've just added, change into a directory containing an appropriate Vagrantfile and issue the vagrant up command. An example Vagrantfile is provided as part of this project.

Credits

The preseed configuration file is borrowed and modified from the folks at Offensive Security, their examples can be found at https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/recipes/kali-preseed-examples.