Packer v 1.5.6 released

[Megan Marsh]

Hello Packer community,

I hope you're all staying healthy and safe. I'm writing to share that Packer version 1.5.6 has been released!

 

There are enough good things that it's hard to pick highlights, but here are a few:

Provisioners now support a `max_retries` option that can be used for automatically retrying a provisioner if it errors rather than having to set --on-error=ask and manually forcing a retry

HCL builds now honor -only and -except flags, bringing our HCL support closer to our json support.

The Ansible provisioner now includes the option to disable the localhost proxy that sometimes causes pipelineing hangs in recent versions of Ansible, and also removes the need for the specialized connection plugin when using the Ansible provisioner with the WinRM communicator.

The newly-integrated VSphere builder has continued to get a lot of great community contributions and enhancements. 

As always, look at the changelog for the full release details: https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#156-may-1-2020

I am absolutely amazed at the pace of community contributions right now, given all of the upheaval that so many of us are facing in our personal and professional lives. It's truly humbling and a real gift to me as a maintainer. Thank you for all the patience you've shown the Packer team as we work to navigate our own lives. As always, reach out to the mailing list with any questions, and use the github issue tracker to let us know if you have any issues with the new version. 

Thanks!

Megan and the Packer Team