How start a local VM built by packer?

Question

I am new to packer. For a start I tried to build: https://github.com/shiguredo/packer-templates/tree/develop/ubuntu-14.04 which worked fine. But when I want to sin it up via vagrant up I get the following error:

Vagrant environment or target machine is required to run this
command. Run `vagrant init` to create a new Vagrant environment. Or,
get an ID of a target machine from `vagrant global-status` to run
this command on. A final option is to change to a directory with a
Vagrantfile and to try again.

After calling vagrant init a config file which looks like a default config file is created. But still there are errors:

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'parallels' provider...
==> default: Box 'base' could not be found. Attempting to find and install...
    default: Box Provider: parallels
    default: Box Version: >= 0
==> default: Adding box 'base' (v0) for provider: parallels
    default: Downloading: base
An error occurred while downloading the remote file. The error
message, if any, is reproduced below. Please fix this error and try
again.

Couldn't open file /Downloads/packer-templates-develop/ubuntu-14.04/base

How can I start my packer-generated VM locally? Is the only solution to keep track of the Vagrantfile manually?

Edit:

if I call vagrant init myNewlyCreatedBox.box Then vagrant will try too boot the VM but

Failed to mount folders in Linux guest. This is usually because
the "prl_fs" file system is not available. Please verify that
Parallels Tools are properly installed in the guest and
can work properly. If so, the VM reboot can solve a problem.
The command attempted was:

mount -t prl_fs -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`getent group vagrant | cut -d: -f3` vagrant /vagrant
mount -t prl_fs -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant` vagrant /vagrant

Answer 1

Those templates will generate a Vagrant box for you. If the process completes successfully you should have ubuntu-14-04-x64-virtualbox.box and ubuntu-14-04-x64-vmware.box file as specified by template.json file. To use those newly created boxes in Vagrant you'll need to add the one corresponding to your specific hypervisor to the list of boxes that Vagrant knows about by the following:

vagrant box add <nameToReferToBox> <pathToBoxYouJustCreated>

for example

vagrant box add ubuntu-14-04-x64 ubuntu-14-04-x64-virtualbox.box

Then to create an instance of that box (a VM) you can simply create a Vagrant file targeting the new box you just imported:

vagrant init ubuntu-14-04-x64

and then spin up a VM based on the base box:

vagrant up