Delete snapshots after the packer build is terminated ?

[Vinaykumar Kadalagi]

Hi I have been using packer since last few days. It is creating AMIs along with snaphots under EBS -> Snapshots. 

And they are not removed even after the build is successful or a failure. 

Is it suppose to remove it or no? If no, Why? And how can it be improved?

[Carlos Tovar]

I am running into the same issue.  Does anybody have any ideas?

[Rickard von Essen]

Quoting the AWS documentation
"Note that you can't delete a snapshot of the root device of an EBS volume used by a registered AMI. You must first deregister the AMI before you can delete the snapshot. For more information, see Deregistering Your AMI."
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-deleting-snapshot.html

If there are snapshots from failed builds I think it's a bug. Please file an issue.

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[Nirav Radia]

I also had a similar problem. There is a CR for that also (https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/3320)

For solving it currently, I gave a tag to AMI (and hence snapshot). Now before starting AMI generation process, I store snapshotid by AWS CLI command. 

previousSnapshotId=$(aws ec2 describe-images --region ${REGION} --owners self --filters "Name=tag:type,Values=${image_type}" "Name=tag:product_version,Values=${product_version}" --query 'Images[0].{Id:BlockDeviceMappings[0].Ebs.SnapshotId}' | jq .Id -r)

And then, I check if the result of the "packer build ..." command is 0, then I delete previous snapshot by ID.

packer build -var "source_ami=${latestCentOS}" -var "region=${REGION}" -var-file=variables.json ami-centos-with-product.json

  

  if [ "$?" = "0" ] && [ "$previousSnapshotId" != "null" ]; then

    echo "Deleting previous AMI snapshot. Id: ${previousSnapshotId}"

    aws ec2 delete-snapshot --region ${REGION} --snapshot-id ${previousSnapshotId}

  fi

Let me know if anyone has any better suggestion of doing it.