CODEWITHSUNDEEP
packer
smilin_stan
smilin_stan

Reputation: 1733

Parallel builds using identical json file

I have a base AMI which contains java and tomcat (ami-c1f3e7a6). My application stack consists of 6 separate java apps based on my base AMI, and I am using packer to create the 6 separate AMIs. The ansible playbook app_playbook.ymldownloads the war file from S3 straight into the tomcat/webapps directory. My packer JSON is:

{
    "variables": {
        "war_file": ""
    },
    "builders": [{
        "type": "amazon-ebs",
        "region": "eu-west-1",
        "source_ami": "ami-c1f3e7a6",
        "instance_type": "t2.small",
        "ssh_username": "ec2-user",
        "ami_name": "app-{{user `war_file`}}-{{timestamp}}"
    }],
    "provisioners": [{
        "type": "ansible",
        "playbook_file": "ansible/app_playbook.yml",
        "extra_arguments": "--extra-vars 'war_file={{user `war_file`}}'"
    }]
}

At the command line I am doing:

packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_1.war' tomcat.json
packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_2.war' tomcat.json
packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_3.war' tomcat.json
packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_4.war' tomcat.json
packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_5.war' tomcat.json
packer build -var 'war_file=release123/application_6.war' tomcat.json

I have been looking into packer's ability to perform parallel builds to speed up the build process but it looks like the provisioner is run against every builder, and I need a specific variable passed into each builder.

I know I could fork the bash commands to execute the builds in parallel, but I feel like there must be a "packer" way of doing this. Any ideas?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 835

Answers (1)

Rickard von Essen
Rickard von Essen

Reputation: 4288

Packer doesn't support running the same builder multiple times. If you want to do that you need to duplicate the builder section for your amazon-ebs builder and the provisioner section using only.

This is best done by preprocessing a snippet with some script to create the final template.

Upvotes: 1

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