Azure Image Builder

Wraps Packer's azure-arm builder for creating custom Azure VM images, either as managed images or Azure Compute Gallery entries. You'll use this when you need golden images with your tooling baked in rather than provisioning at boot time. The skill covers both service principal and managed identity auth, and helpfully warns you upfront that builds take 15-45 minutes and cost actual money. Good examples for both basic managed images and gallery images with multi-region replication. The troubleshooting section is practical, especially the reminder that Compute Gallery versions are immutable, so you can't just rebuild over an existing version number.

skills.sh installs: 2.8K
GitHub stars: 924
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add hashicorp/agent-skills --skill azure-image-builder --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Azure Image Builder

Build Azure managed images and Azure Compute Gallery images using Packer's azure-arm builder.

Reference: Azure ARM Builder

Note: Building Azure images incurs costs (compute, storage, data transfer). Builds typically take 15-45 minutes depending on provisioning and OS.

Basic Managed Image

packer {
  required_plugins {
    azure = {
      source  = "github.com/hashicorp/azure"
      version = "~> 2.0"
    }
  }
}

variable "client_id" {
  type      = string
  sensitive = true
}

variable "client_secret" {
  type      = string
  sensitive = true
}

variable "subscription_id" {
  type = string
}

variable "tenant_id" {
  type = string
}

variable "resource_group" {
  type    = string
  default = "packer-images-rg"
}

locals {
  timestamp = regex_replace(timestamp(), "[- TZ:]", "")
}

source "azure-arm" "ubuntu" {
  client_id       = var.client_id
  client_secret   = var.client_secret
  subscription_id = var.subscription_id
  tenant_id       = var.tenant_id

SKILL.md on GitHub