Packer 1.6.1 released

[Megan Marsh]

Hello Packer Community,

Packer v1.6.1 is released, and with it are several dozen enhancements and bug fixes.

Here are a handful of exciting improvements, which are in no way representative of the huge amount of work in this release:

• Packer now supports oslogin for the Google Compute Engine.
• The vSphere continues to get a lot of attention, including improvements to IP discovery, user experience around defining output folders, changing the boot_command configuration to match that of our other core builders, expanding user options for disk controllers, and the ability to publish vms to the VMWare content library.
• The ssh communicator now supports certificate-signed keys
• We've added a "no_proxy" option to the WinRM communicator
• HCL Packer configs are getting closer to shedding their "beta" status. In this release we have added support for:
  • singular build.source blocks
  • The "packer inspect" command
  • The only/except and keep_input_artifact options
  • The "build" template engine, as well as HCL-style variables for the same build variables
  • post-processor sequence definitions

We have also fixed some good bugs:

• Issues with file path validation in the vagrant builder.
• Ansible provisioner issues with the default environment variables
• URL encoding in the VSphere post-processor has been fixed for special characters.

There are a couple of HCL2 backwards incompatibilities in this release:

• We have changed the way post-processors behave to match that of json configs. We've added a new `post-processors` block to run chained/"sequenced" post-processors after a build. Before this, defining multiple `post-processor` blocks after provisioning steps would automatically run them sequentially, and there was no way to run post-processors independently of each other. Now, doing this makes each post-processor start from the build artifact, unless you have them nested inside a post-processors block.
• In the vSphere builder, we've added an option to add a xhci/usb3 controller; this changes the controller value to an array of strings, which will break your HCL config because it is strictly typed. It will not affect json configs.
  

In addition, there was one non-HCL potential backwards-incompatibility.

• The url encoding bug in the vSphere post-processor rendered some passwords unusable, but some users may have found a workaround by manually encoding the passwords before putting them into Packer's config. If you did this, you will now have issues with your password; you will need to un-encode them.
  

For more information, please check out our change log: https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#161-july-30-2020 And as always, please let us know if you come across any issues.

Thanks,

The Packer Team