ignore building images that already exists

[Khai Do]

We are using packer with the amazon-ebs builder.  The packer build command throws an error when attempting to build an AMI with a name that matches an existing AMI on AWS.  I would like to make packer provide the same info but NOT fail for this use case?  Instead I would like it to just ignore and continue to the next image build.  Is there a way to tell packer to ignore builds where an AMI already exists?  something like an '-skip-already-exist' flag? 

➜ packer --version

1.4.3

➜  packer build -var-file=../vars.json template.json

amazon-ebs output will be in this color.

==> amazon-ebs: Prevalidating AMI Name: weechat-v1.0.0

==> amazon-ebs: Error: AMI Name: 'weechat-v1.0.0' is used by an existing AMI: ami-0ee682a1a7e3717d0

Build 'amazon-ebs' errored: Error: AMI Name: 'weechat-v1.0.0' is used by an existing AMI: ami-0ee682a1a7e3717d0

==> Some builds didn't complete successfully and had errors:

--> amazon-ebs: Error: AMI Name: 'weechat-v1.0.0' is used by an existing AMI: ami-0ee682a1a7e3717d0

==> Builds finished but no artifacts were created.

➜   echo $?

1

[Rickard von Essen]

No you can't do that. As a workaround you can use the aws cli to check if the AMI exists, if so run packer build with -exclude=amazon-ebs 

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