Packer 1.9.0 released

[Lucas Bajolet]

Hello Packer Community,

The Packer team is excited to announce the release of Packer 1.9.0.

This minor release improves how Packer builds are registered to HCP Packer, provides a new mechanism for managing HCP Packer fingerprints, and removes the bundling of external community-maintained plugins from Packer.

Users are encouraged to use either the packer plugins subcommands or the required_plugins block in HCL2 templates alongside the packer init command for managing and installing external plugins.

For a full list of changes, please refer to the Packer CHANGELOG.

Notable Changes:

When publishing builds artifacts to HCP Packer, Packer will now generate a fingerprint that is not based on the Git SHA, but instead a randomly generated ULID. The generated fingerprint removes the need for users to manually define a fingerprint when building images outside of a Git repository. This change also allows re-running of HCP Packer builds on the same template revision.

The following external community-maintained plugins have been removed from the Packer release binary. Users can install these plugins manually using packer init or packer plugins install.

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-alicloud

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-cloudstack

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-hcloud

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-hyperone

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-hyperv

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-jdcloud

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-lxc

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-lxd

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-ncloud

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-openstack

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-proxmox

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-tencentcloud

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-triton

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-yandex

In addition to the plugins above, the following archived provisioner plugins have been removed:

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-chef

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-converge

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-inspec

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-puppet

* https://github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-salt

Notable Fixes:

* The Go module github.com/shirou/gopsutil was updated to fix an intermittent crash on macOS because of an off-by-one error.

* We fixed a problem in our release process regarding LDFLAGS introduced in 1.8.5. This bug resulted in unstripped binaries, raising their size by as much as 45%.

 As always thank you for your continued support and contributions.

The Packer team