The ansible-local provisioner does not accept commas in the "extra_arguments" option

[Mike Titus]

The "extra_arguments" option appears to be intended to accept --tags, --skip-tags, and --extra-vars command line arguments, but (legal) commas in --tags or --skip-tags cause errors during packer build.

This provisioner succeeds:

    "provisioners": [{

        "type": "ansible-local",

        "extra_arguments":  "--tags 'php5'",

        "inventory_file":   "../inventory/packer",

        "playbook_dir":     "..",

        "playbook_file":    "../example.yml"

    }]

This provisioner fails:

    "provisioners": [{

        "type": "ansible-local",

        "extra_arguments":  "--tags 'php5,php-config'",

        "inventory_file":   "../inventory/packer",

        "playbook_dir":     "..",

        "playbook_file":    "../example.yml"

    }]

with this error message:

    docker: Executing Ansible: cd /tmp/packer-provisioner-ansible-local && ANSIBLE_FORCE_COLOR=1 PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ansible-playbook /tmp/packer-provisioner-ansible-local/leadferret.yml --tags 'php5 php-config' -c local -i /tmp/packer-provisioner-ansible-local/packer

    docker: ERROR: tag(s) not found in playbook: php5 php-config.  possible values: application-env-config,build,common,crons,datadog-agent,deploy,leadferret,node_npm,php-config,php5,rsyslog,rundeck-common,rundeck-datadog-agent-restart,ssl-rds,user-accounts

It's clear that the "extra_arguments" parser is stripping out commas.  Is the best way forward to modify the "extra_arguments" parsing to leave commas in-place (possibly breaking option parsing elsewhere), or to add new "tags" and "skip-tags" options that can preserve commas without affecting other parsing?

[Mike Michel]

hi,

i am using

extra_arguments": [

                    "--skip-tags \"zabbix,zabbix-docker,logstash,scaleio\" -e \"tlscert=\""

                ]

works fine for me.

[Jonathan Cremin]

That's because you're wrapping it in brackets, turning it into a single element array.

If you use a string directly it tries to do some array/string magic and ends up removing commas.

[Mike Titus]

That was the problem, I overlooked that extra_arguments takes an array of strings.  Thanks for your help!