Packer binaries on NuGet

[Patrick van der Velde]

Hi All

For those of you in the Windows world who want to use Packer from your build system. I've set up a build on AppVeyor (https://ci.appveyor.com/project/pvandervelde/packer-nuget) which will package the official HashiCorp packer binaries (x86 and x64) as NuGet packages.

If there are any issues with this from the Hashicorp side please let me know and I'll refrain from publishing them on nuget.org. If all is good I will publish them within the next two weeks or so.

Thanks

Petrik

[Matthew Hooker]

Sounds good. I'm not very familiar with the ecosystem, but I thought I'd point out that we also have a chocolatey package https://chocolatey.org/packages/packer. From reading stackoverflow, it sounds like chocolatey is for installing binaries, and nuget is best for code libraries. 

If you'd still like to publish packer on nuget, you might want to submit a PR updating the installation docs with information on how to install packer through nuget: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/blob/master/website/source/docs/installation.html.md

One other thing I thought I'd mention is that you might want to verify that checksums of the downloaded binaries, and to also verify the checksum file signature with our public key. See https://www.hashicorp.com/security.html for more information.

Thanks,

--Matt Hooker

[Patrick van der Velde]

Hi Matt

Yes Chocolatey is more for people wanting to install the application while NuGet is normally used for libraries. The reason I'm wanting to create a NuGet package is that I want to be able to use Packer on the build server without having to install it. That way I can use the version of packer that matches my build instead of the version installed on the server. Additionally I won't need to install things on my build server making it easier to keep the server stable and reducing maintenance.

I've added the verification of the checksums as described on the HashiCorp security page so thanks for that.

I will put a pull request in for the page after I publish the first packages so that I have a URL to point to.

Thanks for the suggestions