Packer 1.8.3 released

[Wilken Rivera]

Hello Packer Community,

The Packer team is excited to announce the release of Packer 1.8.3.

This release contains a number of improvements to the HCP Packer components along with fixes to bugs across Packer core and its bundled plugins. For a full list of changes please see the Packer CHANGELOG.

Plugin Changes:

In continuation of the work to split Packer plugins out from core we are working to move plugins out of the HashiCorp GitHub organization and into externally owned GitHub organizations, where the plugins can be maintained independently of Packer and HashiCorp Packer plugins. This release has three notable plugin changes that users need to prepare for before upgrading.

• packer-plugin-digitalocean: The DigitalOcean Packer plugin is now maintained by the DigitalOcean team. New releases for this plugin are available at https://github.com/digitalocean/packer-plugin-digitalocean. This plugin is still being bundled in the Packer binary but will be removed in a future release. 

• packer-plugin-outscale: The Outscale Packer plugin maintained by the Outscale team since Packer 1.7.9 has been removed from the Packer binary. Users using the Outscale builder are advised to use the packer plugins install and packer init commands for managing the installation of the plugin.

• packer-plugin-scaleway: The Scaleway Packer plugin maintained by the Scaleway team since Packer 1.7.7 has been removed from the Packer binary. Users using the Scaleway builder are advised to use the packer plugins install and packer init commands for managing the installation of the plugin.

Notable Improvements:

• core: For HCP Packer enabled builds a status update (referred to internally as a heartbeat) will now be sent every 2 minutes to the registry to prevent long running builds from being marked as timed out in the HCP Packer UI.

• data/hcp_packer_image: A channel input argument has been added to the data source to retrieve an image from the assigned iteration using a single data source. If using several images from a single iteration you may prefer sourcing an iteration first via the hcp_packer_iteration data source and referencing it for subsequent uses, as the use of hcp_packer_image with the channel argument will generate a potentially billable HCP Packer request.

Notable Fixes:

• core/hcl2: Packer will no longer crash when parsing malformed provisioner override blocks.

• core/hcl2: Packer will no longer crash when running packer validate on templates containing one or more HCP Packer data sources.

As always thank you for your continued support and contributions. 

The Packer team