Multiple Windows reboots with a provisioner

[rsjo...@gmail.com]

Im trying to understand how / with which provisioners i can orchestrate multiple reboots (Windows only) and have packer continue to run. My use case is installing ~20 applications inside of the windows guest and many of those packages will require a reboot. Since i dont always know what those ~20 apps are i dont have the luxury of being able to use windows-restart provisioner and grouping my app installs.

I don't care what provisioner i use (ansible, shell, powershell etc.) i just need som way of having packer not think something has gone wrong when WinRM is no longer responding for a certain period of time.

I had hoped something like expect_disconnect (https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/shell.html#expect_disconnect) could be used but i can't find that anywhere in a provisioner i can use for Windows?

Currently my provisioners are split into 2:

    "provisioners": [
      {
        "type":  "ansible",
        "playbook_file": "ansible/win2016std.yml",
        "groups": ["windows"],
        "extra_arguments": [
          "--connection", "packer",
          "--extra-vars", "ansible_shell_type=powershell ansible_shell_executable=None"
        ]
      },
      {
        "type": "powershell",
        "script": "scripts/my_script.ps1"
      }
    ]

however rebooting inside Ansible seems to be a known issue and if i issue one or multiple reboots inside the powershell provisioner (my_script.ps1) i can't find a way to make Packer wait for either a timeout or a signal before it continues.

thanks