Automated VirtualBox images generation on docker

Hello folks,

I’m trying to automate VirtualBox image generation using docker.

I succeeded to generate VirtualBox image on my Linux non-virtualized box (Ubuntu 20 with packer and virtualbox packages installed). Then I tried to move it to docker based generation to harness github actions but I failed. I used many distribution and many virtualbox packages versions but I can’t move past the error: “The character device /dev/vboxdrv does not exist” which showed every time packer run virtualbox. I feel hopeless.

My question is: have someone succeeded in such undertaking? Maybe I am trying to achieve impossible. How HashiCorp Cloud Platform do this? Have they just real linux machines with all packages pre-installed and use them to generate images for all builders, including VirtualBox?

Best regards,
Kamil Laskowski