Packer 2.0 release timeline

Packer
1

Hi, I’ve just joined a new project at my company where they have been using Packer for some time and I’ve noticed that all of their templates are in json format. When I mentioned that sometime in the future this will be deprecated in favor of HCL2 and suggested a migration the first question was “when is this happening? How much time do we have?”.

So, I started researching and found some articles mentioning this (The Road to Packer 2.0) but I was not able to find any actual timelines or dates.

Is there an estimated date for when Packer 2.0 will be coming out and json support will be dropped?

I’d like to have at least an approximate date to provide to my leaders in order to present a plan for a proper migration of the current templates and/or the necessary adjustments to the pipeline, since these are huge templates and it will not be easy to make the change, even with hcl2_upgrade.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

I’d say the minimum timeline for a 2.0 release is probably something like 6 months from now.

That said, even if you don’t get in ahead of the 2.0 release, your pipeline won’t magically stop working the day we do the release; we intend to make sure that the 1.7.x line is in good shape so that people can keep using it if they want to. The downside there is just that you’d have to pin to older versions of the plugins so you won’t get the latest and greatest features. So I’d suggest aiming to do the migration sometime in the next 6 months, but don’t panic if the roadmap doesn’t allow it. And if you try the migration and hit snags, please reach out to share your pain points.

1 Like
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Hi!
Now that it seems that @SwampDragons is no longer at HashiCorp (at least according to their GitHub profile) who has taken over Packer?
Also, is there new ETA for v2.0?