Packer template pipeline for multiple VMs

Packer
1

I am following this guide for template pipelining:

I have created about 6 scripts and chained them together to generate one VM.

I would now like to modify these scripts to output different VM versions for different purposes.

For example, I have one script which installs all 3rd party software. I have small differences between 2 VMs on what software should be installed.

My problem is this:
To filter provisioners based on VM type I need to define multiple sources for a build.

If I define multiple build sources in the script I will get multiple VM outputs. If I have two scripts in a row which does this I will start to get “thrash VMs” which I need to throw away because I do not know how to tell the scripts that they should only run one of the sources at a time.

Have I misunderstood something here?

Is there a mechanism where I can tell the script to only use one of the two sources when I build?

Is there some other mechanism for filtering provisioners?

Should I follow some other process for pipelining packer scripts together and still be able to generate different VM types using the same scripts?

2

Maybe that will help.

In the link above you can see how to tell a provisioner to run on a specific build source using the only configuration.

Not sure though about running the same proviosoner on multiple builds in a sequence one by one.

provisioner - build - Blocks | Packer by HashiCorp

3

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

Yes I am aware of the “only” parameterization, but that will (as far as I know) still produce multiple outputs when running the script (one output for each source).

The problem begins when combining multiple sources and “only” parameterization with multiple chained together .hcl files. I cannot see how I can chain together .hcl files like that in a build pipeline without running into the issue of generating “trash” VMs?