Packer 1.9.2 released

[Wilken Rivera]

Hello Packer Community,

The Packer team is excited to announce the release of Packer 1.9.2.

This release contains a number of changes to improve the use of external plugins and adds a warning for users who may still be relying on plugins bundled into the Packer binary. Please note that plugins bundled into Packer are not updated as new plugin releases are made; users are encouraged to install plugins separately from Packer via the various plugin installation commands.

For a full list of changes please refer to the Packer CHANGELOG.

Plugin Changes:

• The Parallels plugin has been handed over to the Parallels team. New releases for this plugin are available at https://github.com/parallels/packer-plugin-parallels. This plugin is no longer being bundled in the Packer binary release. Existing references to the plugin will continue to work but users are advised to update the required_plugins block to use the new plugin source address.

Notable Features:

• The hcl2_upgrade sub-command will now add required_plugins to the template generated from JSON for all official plugins.

• Packer will now warn when using bundled plugins. This feature will be removed in a future version of the tool, this warning is meant to bring awareness of the upcoming change, and help users update their templates. 

Notable Fixes:

• Packer would recursively scan all the known directories in which we could have installed plugins. This caused unnecessary directory walks and slowdowns upon invocation. Packer will now only check for nested plugins within the directories used by commands such as packer init, packer plugins install, or as defined in PACKER_PLUGIN_PATH.

As always thank you for your continued support and contributions. 

The Packer team