Why Is This Not Getting Any Smoother? Plagued by brickwall issues

Packer
1

So, when building a Linux machine, I get a 50/50 shot that my shell commands actually get executed. I can’t see shit going on and I get no logs to review. I’m blind here.

So I’ve actually been able to manage using a ansible playbook as part of my build, but as soon as that starts working great, I run into this stupid problem. To setup Docker package management, I have to curl a gpg key and pipe it into a gpg --dearmor command. I’ve tried this with the shell provisioner, and I’m pretty sure its not running this command at all. Then when I moved it to a playbook, I use apt_key and apt_respository. I also have become set to root on an earlier task which is running fine. However, even with root it cannot dearmor the gpg key, and place the keyring.

Like should I be using packer on a Linux machine with VMWare Workstation to get some better performance, and maybe some damn insight into failures. I’m losing my damn mind!

2

To get some logs about whether shell command gets executed our not, below should help.

#!/bin/bash -xe
3

Thanks, man. I think I tried this on script file, but have since switched back to inline commands.

4

I just went through a full exercise of rewriting some horrible patched together packer build, so I feel your pain.

Here are my take aways from the experience:

  • Sometimes packer just doesn’t like what you’re doing … write it a different way, break it up more if you can.
  • What I found is unless your inline is only 1 or 2 lines, use external scripts – much easier to find what is wrong in your logs that way.
  • Always use set -x in your scripts
  • Almost always use set -euo pipefail … let it fail because you’ll see why it’s failing.
  • Break up the provisioners into as many groups as you can stand. I know the impulse is to do everything in one and consolidate, but this is more of a pain to maintain. Smaller, surgical scripts are the way to go.
  • At the top of each script, do a touch /tmp/starting-prov-shell-xxxx so that you can see in the resulting OS if something fails to run and you can see where it failed.
  • Run with PACKER_LOG=1 and tee the output to a file so you can review it.
  • Use a log viewer with syntax color if possible … makes things pop for review much easier.
  • Don’t be afraid to use flag files in your scripts to pass parameters/options to other provisioners further down.
  • At the end of the run, after debugging is complete, do a cleanup script that removes all of your flags, touch, etc files. Only uncomment this section when you’re 100% done.
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