Syntax question: User variables for non-string values

[Kevin Milner]

Hello,

In my variables portion I want to be able to specify default values that can be overridden for disk_size, CPUs, and RAM (this is for jetbrains' vcenter builder plugin). In the builder section, I have this:

       "disk_size": 100,

      "CPUs": 4,

      "RAM": 8000,

and it works fine, but I want to be able to use variables in place.  However, if I put format as:

      "disk_size": {{user `vm_disk_size`}},

      "CPUs": {{user `vm_cpu`}},

      "RAM": {{user `vm_ram`}},

(No quotations around the value), the parser chokes because it doesn't know what to do with the brackets. I would expect this.
If I put the quotation marks around the values, however, I get the following error:

* variable vm_cpu: '' expected type 'string', got unconvertible type 'float64'

So it seems like I need to be able to denote this variable as a non-string type. Any idea how I do this?

Thanks

[Rickard von Essen]

I think you are reading the error message backwards. Packer converts the value to a number, but the plugin (which is unknown to me) expects a string. I think this is probably a bug in the plugin. 

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[Kevin Milner]

never mind, it was complaining on the variable declaration, not the builder.

[Rickard von Essen]

Hmm check the plugin and it looks correct. Can you share your template and command line when you get this error?