Upload VirtualBox Image to S3

Once the image is generated it will be used by other parts of your operations workflow. For example, it is common to build VirtualBox images with Packer to be used as base boxes in Vagrant.

The exact process for uploading images depends on the artifact store and CI system you use. TeamCity provides a Build Artifacts feature which can be used to store the newly generated image. Other CI/CD services also have similar build artifacts features built in, like Circle CI Build Artifacts. In addition to the built in artifact stores in CI/CD tools, there are also dedicated universal artifact storage services like Artifactory. All of these are great options for image artifact storage.

The following example uses TeamCity and Amazon S3.

Example: Uploading to S3 in a TeamCity Build

On the agent machine responsible for building images, install the AWS Command Line Tool. Since this is a one-time operation, this can be incorporated into the initial agent provisioning step when installing other dependencies. The AWS Command Line tool may require installing additional dependencies prior.

$ pip install awscli

In your build configuration in TeamCity Server, add an additional Build Step: Command Line and set the Script content field to the following:

$ awscli s3 cp . s3://bucket/ --exclude “*” --include “*.ovf"