Windows AMI creation on EC2

[Angel Rengifo Cancino]

Hello guys:

I have a doubt. What's the currently recommended or supported way of provisioning Windows with ansible on EC2?

I mean, there's a Ansible connection plugin for Packer that must be created (downloaded or installed) before attempting to use a code like this:

"provisioners": [
      {
        "type": "ansible",
        "playbook_file": "../playbooks/windows_image_build/playbook.yml",        
        "extra_arguments": [
          "--extra-vars", "{'environment_name': 'packer', 'hosting_environment': 'aws', 'connection': 'packer'}",
          "--skip-tags", "gitchecks",
          "--skip-tags", "gather_facts",
          "--skip-tags", "slack"
        ]
      }
    ]

The other way I had in mind is running ansible with shell-local, like this:

    "provisioners": [
        {
            "type": "shell-local",
            "inline":   [
                "ansible-playbook -i {{ user `os_ipaddr` }}, \\",
                "-e ansible_user='{{ user `os_adminuser` }}' \\",
                "-e ansible_password='{{ user `os_adminpass` }}' \\",
                "-e os_update='{{ user `os_update` }}' \\",
                "-e os_firstinstall={{ user `os_firstinstall`}} \\",
                "{{ user `ansible_playbook` }}"
            ]
        }
    ]

(please ignore my custom vars)

I'm not sure how to setup my connection plugin for ansible 2.8.x. Any ideas on this?

Otherwise, do you know how can I get the public IPv4 and password for my recently created Windows EC2 instance? I'm not sure if {{.WinRMPassword}} variable is valid here.

Hope someone can give me some guidance.

Thanks in advance

[Rickard von Essen]

To get the IP for running ansible in shell-local do:

A) Run a shell provisioner that saves the IP in a file. Use a file provisioner to download it and read it in the shell-local script. 

Or B) use some aws tag specific to this build and run the aws cli to find the IP of that instance.

I would expect Ansible 2.8 with WinRM support in Packer to be at best rocky. But if you are into troubleshooting things it's probably worth at least trying. 

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[Angel Rengifo Cancino]

Hello Rickard, thanks for your reply

On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 11:33 AM Rickard von Essen <rickard....@gmail.com> wrote:

To get the IP for running ansible in shell-local do:

A) Run a shell provisioner that saves the IP in a file. Use a file provisioner to download it and read it in the shell-local script. 

 How do I get the IP? I'm not aware of any packer variable or setting that contains such value in a similar way as {{.WinRMPassword}} for password.

Or B) use some aws tag specific to this build and run the aws cli to find the IP of that instance.

That could be an option if option A does not work as expected.

I would expect Ansible 2.8 with WinRM support in Packer to be at best rocky. But if you are into troubleshooting things it's probably worth at least trying.

Ansible 2.8 does work pretty well with WinRM. However, the special "packer" connection used by ansible provisioner it requires a plugin, as far as I know, but that's where I get confused.

[Rickard von Essen]

> How do I get the IP? 

Curl the metadata service on AWS, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-metadata.html#instancedata-data-retrieval

A example that used to work at least. Haven't tried it lately. 

https://github.com/Diabol/packer-demo/blob/master/windows-cloud-ansible.json

> However, the special "packer" connection used by ansible provisioner it requires a plugin, as far as I know, but that's where I get confused.

This is fairly well described in the docs:

https://packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible.html#winrm-communicator

Maybe you can show what you have and what issue you are seeing. 

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