Packer failure due to non-existent custom cookbook path created by shell-local provisioner (berks)

Question

I have a packer configuration that provisions using chef-solo in AWS EC2. This works well. I have introduced berkshelf to manage 3rd party cookbooks and this isn't working as well.

I am working in a chef repo that has locally developed cookbooks, roles, data bags, etc. By introducing berks, I want to keep the cookbooks directory clean, and put 3rd party cookbooks into vendor/cookbooks (which is git excluded so keeps repos clean / minimizes chances of other devs adding / pushing berks-managed cookbooks in to vcs). So I added a shell-local provisioner before a chef-solo provisioner, which runs berks vendor vendor/cookbooks and updated the chef-solo provisioner with cookbook_paths ["cookbooks","vendor/cookbooks"]. My idea is that the shell-local would run before the chef-solo and both cookbook paths would be available.

However, when I run packer build, it fails fast trying to resolve the cookbook paths before the AWS builder even starts building, failing with reference to the non-existent vendor/cookbooks directory. Here is the packer provisioners segment:

   "provisioners" : [
        {
            "type": "shell-local",
            "command": "bundle install && bundle exec berks vendor vendor/cookbooks"
        },
        {
            "type" : "chef-solo",
            "cookbook_paths" : ["cookbooks","vendor/cookbooks"],
            "environments_path" : "environments",
            "roles_path" : "roles",
            "run_list" : ["role[somerole]"]
        }
    ],

When I run this, it fails:

amazon-ebs output will be in this color.

1 error(s) occurred:

* Bad cookbook path 'vendor/cookbooks': stat vendor/cookbooks: no such file or directory

Is there a mechanism in packer that will run the shell-local first before resolving the chef-solo provisioner? I'd like to avoid running berks in the builder (i.e. I want the cookbooks resolved by the host running packer), and would ideally like to have this run solely in packer as apposed to wrapper scripts that run berks first. I have resolved this for now by vendoring into cookbooks, but would like to avoid this route if possible too.

Rickard von Essen Rickard von Essen · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-14T06:46:12

Just create an empty directory vendor/cookbooks.

Is there a mechanism in packer that will run the shell-local first before resolving the chef-solo provisioner?

No

and would ideally like to have this run solely in packer as apposed to wrapper scripts that run berks first.

I would recommend to reconsider if you have another problem like this. Packer tries to do one thing well and leave allot out that could better be solved by a wrapper script.

Packer failure due to non-existent custom cookbook path created by shell-local provisioner (berks)

1 Answers