hashicorp/packer v1.12.0

on GitHub

1.12.0 (January 22, 2025)

FEATURES:

• core: add support for a DAG-based evaluation on locals and datasources.
  A long-standing odditiy of Packer has been the order of evaluation for
  locals and data sources. In previous versions of Packer, the
  data sources were evaluated first, then the local variables were, making
  it impossible to have a datasource that referenced a local variable as
  part of its configuration.
  This change introduces a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to evaluate those
  resources, instead of the phased approach of old, which makes the order
  of evaluation not dependent on the type of resource, but instead of the
  detected dependencies between them.
  Note: While we are confident this should be robust enough for general
  use, we do recognise that it is possible some users might encounter issues.
  To give those users a way to continue using the old evaluation method, we
  introduced a -use-sequential-evaluation command-line flag to the build,
  validate, console and inspect subcommands, to force using the sequential
  evaluation approach for those entities.
  GH-13155

• core/hcp: support for uploading SBOMs to HCP Packer.
  Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) are a standardised way to export the various
  software packages linked to an artifact. As some users have expressed a
  need to produce and access those for images they build, we now add the
  feature to Packer itself.
  While the generation of the SBOM itself is not done directly by
  Packer, instead we recommend using known scanners to produce them, we add
  the capacity to upload this SBOM file to HCP Packer, and link it to a
  build artifact.
  GH-13171

• core: support for alternate serialisation formats for plugin communication.
  Packer relies on plugins to do most of the actual workload related to
  building and provisioing artifacts, while Packer is mostly an orchestrator
  for those plugins to perform their work.
  This separation of concerns implies that both entities have to
  communicate on multiple occasions during the course of a build.
  Before v1.12.0 of Packer, and v0.6.0 of the plugin SDK, we used Gob to
  do most of the serialisation for those steps.
  This is however a bit of a problem recently, as go-cty, the library we
  use for dynamic objects lifted from HCL templates, dropped support for
  this a while back.
  Therefore now, we introduce an alternative: protobuf/msgpack, which are
  both usable and maintained by the projects around Packer, so we can begin
  our transition away from gob with this change.
  Note: as with the introduction of the DAG for locals/datasources, this
  is a feature that we are reasonably confident you will not encounter bugs
  with, however we cannot rule-out this possibility, therefore we introduce
  a new environment variable: PACKER_FORCE_GOB, which if set to '1', forces
  the use of Gob instead of protobuf/msgpack.
  GH-13120

IMPROVEMENTS:

• hcl2/json: add aws_secretsmanager_raw funcion.
  When using the AWS secretsmanager function with a non-text secret, one could
  only get a secret once at a time.
  This could get cumbersome if wanting to get multiple through one request,
  which led people to encode their JSON/Object secrets as a big base64
  encoded string that they could get once, and then manipulate through JSON
  functions.
  While the workaround works, it is one extra layer of manipulations to do so,
  therefore a new function to always get the raw textual version of a secret
  is now added to Packer.
  GH-13242
• hcl2: add alltrue and anytrue functions.
  As with Terraform, Packer now supports the HCL functions alltrue and
  anytrue, which returns whether or not a collection only consists of
  true values, or if any is.
  GH-13237
• hcl2: add strcontains function.
  As with Terraform, Packer now supports the HCL function strcontains,
  which returns whether or not a string contains a substring within it.
  GH-13217
  GH-13222
• datasource/http: Support other methods than GET.
  The HTTP datasource used to always use GET requests for getting data
  from a remote HTTP server, which was not always enough since some endpoints
  may only support other methods. This change allows for most of the HTTP
  methods to perform those requests.
  GH-13190
• hcl2: add base64gzip function.
  In some cases, small blobs may need to be kept in memory, and injected in
  a template somewhere else, but if the blob needs to be minimised, the
  base64gzip function can be invoked to compress the blob and expose it
  as a valid HCL2 string for use later.
  GH-13142

BUG FIXES:

• hcl2: Fix duplicate error messages on top-level HCL violations.
  A parsing quirk for HCL templates caused Packer to produce the same parsing
  error multiple times if the error was caused by a top-level violation.
  GH-13245
• build: Include LC_UUID in Darwin binaries.
  A change in how Apple authorises a plugin to access the network caused
  Packer to break on recent (14.7 and above) macOS versions, as Packer uses
  the local network to communicate with plugins.
  The fix is to include an additional UUID into the metadata of the produced
  binary, so it is authorised by macOS to use the local network, which prompts
  an update to the version of Go used for building Packer (1.22.9), as it is
  when this addition is supported by an LDFLAG.
  GH-13214
• hcl2: Don't error on empty bucker slug.
  As reported by members of our community, using a hcp_packer_registry
  block without a bucket slug, even if provided by external means, would cause
  Packer to fail with an invalid bucket slug error. This is most definitely
  a bug, which is addressed in this release.
  GH-13210
• hcp: fix bug when trying to extract HEAD SHA from empty Git repo.
  GH-13165

SECURITY:

• Bump to go-crypto v0.31.0
  GH-13233

NOTES:

• docs: fix UUIDv4 example. A community user has found discrepancies in the
  UUIDv4 examples which were used in our docs, as they do not match the
  standard.
  GH-13229
• hcl2: fix slice initialisation method during variable evaluation phase.
  GH-13175