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The ansible Packer provisioner allows Ansible playbooks to be run to provision the machine.	docs	Ansible - Provisioners	docs-provisioners-ansible-remote

Ansible Provisioner

Type: ansible

The ansible Packer provisioner runs Ansible playbooks. It dynamically creates an Ansible inventory file configured to use SSH, runs an SSH server, executes ansible-playbook, and marshals Ansible plays through the SSH server to the machine being provisioned by Packer.

-> Note:: Any remote_user defined in tasks will be ignored. Packer will always connect with the user given in the json config for this provisioner.

Basic Example

This is a fully functional template that will provision an image on DigitalOcean. Replace the mock api_token value with your own.

{
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "type": "ansible",
      "playbook_file": "./playbook.yml"
    }
  ],

  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "digitalocean",
      "api_token": "6a561151587389c7cf8faa2d83e94150a4202da0e2bad34dd2bf236018ffaeeb",
      "image": "ubuntu-14-04-x64",
      "region": "sfo1"
    }
  ]
}

Configuration Reference

Required Parameters:

playbook_file - The playbook to be run by Ansible.

Optional Parameters:

ansible_env_vars (array of strings) - Environment variables to set before running Ansible. Usage example:

{
  "ansible_env_vars": [ "ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING=False", "ANSIBLE_SSH_ARGS='-o ForwardAgent=yes -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s'", "ANSIBLE_NOCOLOR=True" ]
}

command (string) - The command to invoke ansible. Defaults to ansible-playbook.
empty_groups (array of strings) - The groups which should be present in inventory file but remain empty.
extra_arguments (array of strings) - Extra arguments to pass to Ansible. These arguments will not be passed through a shell and arguments should not be quoted. Usage example:
```
{
  "extra_arguments": [ "--extra-vars", "Region={{user `Region`}} Stage={{user `Stage`}}" ]
}
```
groups (array of strings) - The groups into which the Ansible host should be placed. When unspecified, the host is not associated with any groups.
inventory_file (string) - The inventory file to use during provisioning. When unspecified, Packer will create a temporary inventory file and will use the host_alias.
host_alias (string) - The alias by which the Ansible host should be known. Defaults to default. This setting is ignored when using a custom inventory file.
inventory_directory (string) - The directory in which to place the temporary generated Ansible inventory file. By default, this is the system-specific temporary file location. The fully-qualified name of this temporary file will be passed to the -i argument of the ansible command when this provisioner runs ansible. Specify this if you have an existing inventory directory with host_vars group_vars that you would like to use in the playbook that this provisioner will run.
local_port (string) - The port on which to attempt to listen for SSH connections. This value is a starting point. The provisioner will attempt listen for SSH connections on the first available of ten ports, starting at local_port. A system-chosen port is used when local_port is missing or empty.
sftp_command (string) - The command to run on the machine being provisioned by Packer to handle the SFTP protocol that Ansible will use to transfer files. The command should read and write on stdin and stdout, respectively. Defaults to /usr/lib/sftp-server -e.
skip_version_check (boolean) - Check if ansible is installed prior to running. Set this to true, for example, if you're going to install ansible during the packer run.
ssh_host_key_file (string) - The SSH key that will be used to run the SSH server on the host machine to forward commands to the target machine. Ansible connects to this server and will validate the identity of the server using the system known_hosts. The default behavior is to generate and use a onetime key. Host key checking is disabled via the ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING environment variable if the key is generated.
ssh_authorized_key_file (string) - The SSH public key of the Ansible ssh_user. The default behavior is to generate and use a onetime key. If this key is generated, the corresponding private key is passed to ansible-playbook with the --private-key option.
user (string) - The ansible_user to use. Defaults to the user running packer.
set_winrm_passwd (boolean) - Set to true if you are running on AWS, Azure or Google Compute and would like to access the generated password that Packer uses to connect to the instance via WinRM. The password will be avaliable to the Ansible provisioner through the environment variable GENERATED_WINRM_PASSWORD. You will also need to set ansible_password in your ansible playbook, for example, ansible_password: "{{ lookup('env','GENERATED_WINRM_PASSWORD') }}"

Default Extra Variables

In addition to being able to specify extra arguments using the extra_arguments configuration, the provisioner automatically defines certain commonly useful Ansible variables:

packer_build_name is set to the name of the build that Packer is running. This is most useful when Packer is making multiple builds and you want to distinguish them slightly when using a common playbook.
packer_builder_type is the type of the builder that was used to create the machine that the script is running on. This is useful if you want to run only certain parts of the playbook on systems built with certain builders.

Debugging

To debug underlying issues with Ansible, add "-vvvv" to "extra_arguments" to enable verbose logging.

{
  "extra_arguments": [ "-vvvv" ]
}

Limitations

Redhat / CentOS

Redhat / CentOS builds have been known to fail with the following error due to sftp_command, which should be set to /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server -e:

==> virtualbox-ovf: starting sftp subsystem
    virtualbox-ovf: fatal: [default]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "SSH Error: data could not be sent to the remote host. Make sure this host can be reached over ssh", "unreachable": true}

chroot communicator

Building within a chroot (e.g. amazon-chroot) requires changing the Ansible connection to chroot.

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "amazon-chroot",
      "mount_path": "/mnt/packer-amazon-chroot",
      "region": "us-east-1",
      "source_ami": "ami-123456"
    }
  ],
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "type": "ansible",
      "extra_arguments": [
        "--connection=chroot",
        "--inventory-file=/mnt/packer-amazon-chroot,"
      ],
      "playbook_file": "main.yml"
    }
  ]
}

winrm communicator

Windows builds require a custom Ansible connection plugin and a particular configuration. Assuming a directory named connection_plugins is next to the playbook and contains a file named packer.py which implements the connection plugin. On versions of Ansible before 2.4.x, the following works as the connection plugin

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function)
__metaclass__ = type

from ansible.plugins.connection.ssh import Connection as SSHConnection

class Connection(SSHConnection):
    ''' ssh based connections for powershell via packer'''

    transport = 'packer'
    has_pipelining = True
    become_methods = []
    allow_executable = False
    module_implementation_preferences = ('.ps1', '')

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Connection, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Newer versions of Ansible require all plugins to have a documentation string. You can see if there is a plugin available for the version of Ansible you are using here.

To create the plugin yourself, you will need to copy all of the options from the DOCUMENTATION string from the ssh.py Ansible connection plugin of the Ansible version you are using and add it to a packer.py file similar to as follows

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function)
__metaclass__ = type

from ansible.plugins.connection.ssh import Connection as SSHConnection

DOCUMENTATION = '''
    connection: packer
    short_description: ssh based connections for powershell via packer
    description:
        - This connection plugin allows ansible to communicate to the target packer
        machines via ssh based connections for powershell.
    author: Packer
    version_added: na
    options:
      **** Copy ALL the options from
      https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/plugins/connection/ssh.py
      for the version of Ansible you are using ****
'''

class Connection(SSHConnection):
    ''' ssh based connections for powershell via packer'''

    transport = 'packer'
    has_pipelining = True
    become_methods = []
    allow_executable = False
    module_implementation_preferences = ('.ps1', '')

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Connection, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

This template should build a Windows Server 2012 image on Google Cloud Platform:

{
  "variables": {},
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "type":  "ansible",
      "playbook_file": "./win-playbook.yml",
      "extra_arguments": [
        "--connection", "packer",
        "--extra-vars", "ansible_shell_type=powershell ansible_shell_executable=None"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "googlecompute",
      "account_file": "{{user `account_file`}}",
      "project_id": "{{user `project_id`}}",
      "source_image": "windows-server-2012-r2-dc-v20160916",
      "communicator": "winrm",
      "zone": "us-central1-a",
      "disk_size": 50,
      "winrm_username": "packer",
      "winrm_use_ssl": true,
      "winrm_insecure": true,
      "metadata": {
        "sysprep-specialize-script-cmd": "winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic=\"true\"}"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Too many SSH keys

SSH servers only allow you to attempt to authenticate a certain number of times. All of your loaded keys will be tried before the dynamically generated key. If you have too many SSH keys loaded in your ssh-agent, the Ansible provisioner may fail authentication with a message similar to this:

    googlecompute: fatal: [default]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:62684' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.\r\nReceived disconnect from 127.0.0.1 port 62684:2: too many authentication failures\r\nAuthentication failed.\r\n", "unreachable": true}

To unload all keys from your ssh-agent, run:

$ ssh-add -D

Become: yes

We recommend against running Packer as root; if you do then you won't be able to successfully run your ansible playbook as root; become: yes will fail.

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