archived the channel

Ah, nevermind:

> Users are encouraged to use the shell or shell-local provisioner to run the provisioning tools made available by this plugin

What are folks using for post provisioning tests? I used Inspec in the past but I see the provisioner has been archived:
• https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-inspec

I am trying to build an AMI, but i am taking the previous build AMI as source, On the top of that AMI, i want to update some additional packages and some folder needs to create, but when i run the packer command second time, its failing with the folder already exist.

Is there a way to check the folder and if its available, need to skip that provisioner step.

Can someone help me to add that step and ignore if its already available.?

Regards,

hi #packer team,

anyone tried adapting null-label to packer hcl? found myself writing quite a few packer files and the null-label would be kinda nice to translate for generation of tags ami naming convetions etc

Hello all 👋

I have a question that I have not been able to properly google.

Is there any way to import (upto a point) an amazon generated AMI into packer? I’m dealing with something that was manually created, and i’m trying to “codify” it as much as possible.

I'm curious how people are organizing their packer code. Do you have a general packer repo with all packer builds within? Do you have one repo per packer build? Or is the packer build contained with the code repo similar to the docker way?

Hello all, just wanted to share my post on Packer if you haven't seen it yet: https://www.taccoform.com/posts/pkr_p1/

I've been experiencing the weirdest issue with Packer:
• Running a build on a Windows image in ca-central-1 has issues with WinRM where it's unable to connect and times out
• Changing the region to us-east-1 immediately resolves the issue
• I've been able to recreate this with the tutorial from the Packer docs
Has anyone run into this as well? Can anyone recreate this on their end?

I first noticed this yesterday and felt like I was going insane

But I’m getting this error message instead:

Error: Failed preparing provisioner-block "shell" ""

  on jenkins-slave-ami.pkr.hcl line 87:
  (source code not available)

render 'environment_vars': template: root:1:20: executing "root" at <user
`AWS_SESSION_TOKEN`>: error calling user: test in:

AWS_SESSION_TOKEN={{user `AWS_SESSION_TOKEN`}}

Why won’t this work? I need to pass environment variables from my laptop’s CLI to the provisioner, so that they can be printed out by the test_script.sh script

Hey guys,

Need some packer help

Any examples out there for a multi-stage Dockerfile in Packer? I want to have a build containers, npm assets for frontend, backend golang, and final layer that copies the directory or binaries from previous stages to the final image.

Hey Packer Peeps, I have been using packer for a year at an old company and it worked flawlessly however I am at a new company with restrictions on AWS security groups and any SG created with wide open access is automagically deleted. Therefore when packer try's to do anything via ssh over port 22 and the temp SG [0.0.0.0\0] packer times out waiting for ssh access. Does anyone know of a way to specify something other than [0.0.0.0\0] in the packer file?

Hello,
I've many windows packer jobs that have been running for many months and even years in some cases.
We've always had the odd winrm issue where it never connects but normally rerunning the packer job works without any adjustment. However, over the last week. our success rates have dropped to around 1 in 8 runs being successful. I've historically used the winrm enablement example code from https://www.packer.io/docs/communicators/winrm
but noticed this week that there is a new recommendation to not use quick config and use a different approach
https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/packer/getting-started-build-image#warning
Using the exact copy of the latter script hasn't yet shown any improvement in success rates. I'm using the windows 2016 base image from MS and the standard AWS ebs builder configuration. I've also tried the latest packer version. Before I start a deep dive on one of the failing image I'd like to ask if anybody has experienced similar issues or maybe converted to using ssh and found it more reliable? I'd really welcome your thoughts.

Packer hcl is almost complete https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/9176

Only packer fix and packer fmt is left

I'd like to create an AMI from a ISO file. I've found that I had to follow this path: iso -> ova/qcow2 -> ami
Have you seen any guide for building this kind of workflow?
Thank you

Is there terminology for an image that has software installed but no stage specific settings? Likewise for an image that has software installed and is pre-baked with stage specific settings?

with automation and cheap storage amis need to be less golden. it makes much more sense to build a more specific ami

How does everyone here create golden amis with toggles ? such as if you want instance X to use AMI1 with datadog and instance Y to use AMI1 without datadog, you wouldn't build a whole new AMI, you'd have some kind of flag or feature toggle, right?

Would love to here thoughts on this. I'm wondering if we can do something with SSM or tagging on instances to use as toggles.

@johnnym has joined the channel

is there a packer linter ?

Hi Everyone - How do I set image name in packer docker image builder script?

Anyone use hcl for packer?

Hey I am trying to pass 2 env vars from a ci pipeline to my shell provisioner somehow this does not seems to work. RESOURCES_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and RESOURCES_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY my packer json is in the thread

Anyone seen/used https://github.com/wata727/packer-post-processor-amazon-ami-management ?

anyone know how to retrieve the source ami date ?

cool 😎 thanks!

haven't had time to try out HCL with packer yet

i've only used JSON with packer

oh, good idea! you use HCL or JSON for that?

make your 1 param an env var in the packer json, and then write a Makefile that sets the var and calls packer once for each value

I usually use a Makefile with an environment variable to build AMIs dynamically with packer

Hi there!
haven't done my research yet, but quite curious about HCL & packer - is it possible to "import modules"? I'll have about 5 AMIs to pack and all JSONs look the same except for 1 parameter.
Anyone have a solution? 🙂

Adding @U010XGY9B46 bot

Hi all. Last weekend I started a small project that is a web user interface for generating Packer templates. The project is still in its infancy and has a lot of room for improvement, but I'd love to get some feedback. The source code is here: https://github.com/jasonwalsh/punk.

Thanks @David! This is exactly what I needed to see 😉
Helped me building my (slightly simpler) python script 😃

If you want to do it in a script, here's a ts-node script I wrote yesterday that runs a command on each instance to gracefully kill its process, then shuts down the instance, then waits for a new healthy instance to come up, then repeats with all other nodes until all nodes have been cycled.

The commands in python would likely be very similar

so in other words: do you usually run terraform programmatically? based on some external events?

Hey there!
I'm about to build (AWS) AMIs via crontab on one of our service machine. Afterwards I'll update Lanch conf + autoscaled group with python and boto3.
How do you "rotate" the machines in the autoscaled group?
I know terraform can be used fot this, but I feel like i don't want to run terraform automatically. Not quite sure why. The only concern is it should also commit TF state changes - I know, this is not recommended way how to store state, shame on me.

@UUB28NLDS help keep tabs! 😉

I'm getting weird Go lang array type errors back when the processor is run and I have to do a complete vagrant-iso build each time to test it

does anyone know if it's possible to run a 'vagrant-cloud' post-processor in isolation (after an asset is built) ?

I made this https://slalom-consulting-ltd.github.io/learn-packer/ . If it's useful or missing something let me know. Ta.

Anyone here use the checksum post processor to tag docker images with the checksum? Trying to figure this out