How can I intergrade packer output image id(Azure) to terraform variables automatically?

Packer
1

I’m using packer with ansible provisioner to build an azure image, and terraform to set up the infrastructure with that azure image as a source

When command packer build pack.json completes successfully I get the output image id and URL

In my terraform variables variables.tf I need to specify the source image id, region etc. The problem here is that I don’t want to specify them manually or multiple times. For region (that I know beforehand) it’s easy since I can use environment variables in both situations, but what about the output image? Is there a built-in way to chain these products or some not so hacky approach to do it?

2

You can store the image id and other data in a manifest file using the manifest post-processor, and then parse the data from there. We’re working on a pipelineing tool (HCP Packer registry) that will make this integration much easier; more news to come on that front pretty soon.