Like the 'puppet-masterless' and 'puppet-server' provisioners (and unlike the 'chef-solo' and 'chef-client' provisioners), the 'ansible-local' currently requires Ansible to be present on the provisioned image. The relevant issue to add an install option to the provisioner is: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/2010 Until then, a notice similar to the 'puppet-masterless' and 'puppet-server' ones is added.