Hello everybody!
I have packer happily building AMIs as part of my CI pipeline, however I need to modify the behavior a bit and am not sure whether this can be solved natively in packer. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
What I would like to happen is that when packer runs, it’ll use a source_ami_filter (or something similar) to see if there’s an existing AMI. If there is not, then it should fall back on either a different source_ami_filter, or a hard-coded source_ami.
The usecase is this:
- Packer runs for the first time in a new environment. It checks if there is an existing AMI built by us. There is not. It builds a new AMI based off of the latest ubuntu AMI instead.
- Packer runs for the second time in this environment. It checks if there is an existing AMI built by us. There is. It builds a new AMI based off of the latest packer-created AMI (from step 1).
If this isn’t possible, I could add a step in my pipeline, before packer, to do this logic via a bash script, and then when I do call packer, I could pass in -only to choose an appropriate source, or a -var with the source_ami to use.
Thank you!