How to make Ansible Tasks work with Packer

[gigi...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I’m trying to use Ansible as a provisioner with Packer. I have a playbook with tasks that:
-create a local directory (win_file)
-download a file from s3 (aws_s3)
-run windows updates (win_updates)

It works fine when I run it manually, but when I run it from Packer (Ansible provisioner), the only Task that works is the one to create a local directory. The other Tasks fail with generic error: "msg": "Unexpected failure during module execution.

Is there a limit to which modules will work with Packer?
Is there something special you need to do to make the modules work? I’m pretty new to Ansbile – thanks much for any help

- hosts: all

  tasks:

 

  - name: Create a directory

    win_file:

      path: C:\updater

      state: directory

 

  - name: download chocolatey from s3 to control host

    vars:

      ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3

    aws_s3:

      bucket: launch-data

      object: chocolatey.0.10.13.nupkg

      dest: /home/ec2-user/chocolatey.0.10.13.nupkg

      mode: get

    delegate_to: localhost

  - name: copy chocolatey from control host to target host updater folder

    win_copy:

      src: /home/ec2-user/chocolatey.0.10.13.nupkg

      dest: C:\updater\chocolatey.0.10.13.nupkg

 

   - name: run windows update

    win_updates:

      category_names:

      - CriticalUpdates

      - SecurityUpdates

      state: installed

    register: update_result 

  - name: reboot host if required after updates

    win_reboot:

    when: update_result.reboot_required

[Tony Chia]

There is no limitation which task can be run from packer.

Try adding -vvvv when you execute from packer and from outside of packer and compare the results

Regards
Tony Chia

[gigi...@gmail.com]

Thank You - Only the fist line is the same:

TASK [download chocolatey from s3 to control host] *****************************

    amazon-ebs: task path: /home/ec2-user/manual-builds/play-win2016-test2-pack.yaml:9
after this the output is very different for each

I can see an actual error when the playbook is run from Packer:

amazon-ebs:   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ansible/plugins/shell/__init__.py", line 210, in append_command

amazon-ebs:   if self._SHELL_AND:

amazon-ebs: AttributeError: 'ShellModule' object has no attribute '_SHELL_AND'

amazon-ebs: fatal: [default]: FAILED! => {

amazon-ebs:  "msg": "Unexpected failure during module execution.",

[gigi...@gmail.com]

As it turns out I was able to work around this by using the win_get_url module instead of aws_s3