Lucas Bajolet
548893bbee
When running a build with HCP Packer enabled, Packer attempts to push the build status to HCP. If the build fails, we update the status to BUILD_FAILED, and that's the end of it. If however the build succeeds, Packer attempts to get the HCP artifact from the builder, which will only succeed if the builder supports it. Otherwise, we'll get either nil, or an artifact type that is not compatible with what is expected for HCP support. When either of those happens, we warn that the builder may not support HCP Packer at all, so users are aware of the problem. However, when the error was introduced, it only looked at the fact that an error was produced, independently of the type of error. This caused legitimate errors while building to be reported as potential incompatibility between the builder and HCP, which was confusing to users. This commit changes this by introducing a new error type, only produced when the artifact either is nil, or failed to be deserialised into a HCP artifact, which lets us produce the incompatibility warning with more accuracy.
Packer
Packer is a tool for building identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer supports various platforms through external plugin integrations, the full list of which can be found at https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/integrations.
The images that Packer creates can easily be turned into Vagrant boxes.
Quick Start
Packer
There is a great introduction and getting started guide for building a Docker image on your local machine without using any paid cloud resources.
Alternatively, you can refer to getting started with AWS to learn how to build a machine image for an external cloud provider.
HCP Packer
HCP Packer registry stores Packer image metadata, enabling you to track your image lifecycle.
To get started with building an AWS machine image to HCP Packer for referencing in Terraform refer to the collection of HCP Packer Tutorials.
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Packer website at https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/docs.
Contributing to Packer
See CONTRIBUTING.md for best practices and instructions on setting up your development environment to work on Packer.
Unmaintained Plugins
As contributors' circumstances change, development on a community maintained plugin can slow. When this happens, HashiCorp may use GitHub's option to archive the plugin’s repository, to clearly signal the plugin's status to users.
What does unmaintained mean?
- The code repository and all commit history will still be available.
- Documentation will remain on the Packer website.
- Issues and pull requests are monitored as a best effort.
- No active development will be performed by HashiCorp.
If you are interested in maintaining an unmaintained or archived plugin, please reach out to us at [email protected].