Packer: Allow user to access the randomly-generated WinRM password in the Powershell provisioner.

[SwampDragons]

Feature: Add a new template or env variable like "{{ .WinRMPassword }}"

In the future: We recommend using shell-local to run Ansible, but doing so means users must first generate the temporary host file. In https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/4904#issuecomment-349844919 a user requested being able to access the randomly-generated EC2 Windows password in order to be able to generate this file.

[matt-richardson]

Will this be ansible specific? This would be super useful in the powershell provisioner as well.

[SwampDragons]

@matt-richardson good point; I'll remove the ansible tag from this issue.

[rickard-von-essen]

See #3911 and #3969

[SwampDragons]

See also https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/3452

[SwampDragons]

https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/4409 is probably the right approach here.

[Marcus-James-Adams]

I have a similar request under https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/5871 for oracle-oci i also know that alibaba and some openstack also have the random password generated at build - perhaps this should be an option for all providers?

[SwampDragons]

@Marcus-James-Adams Agreed. Once we have the framework in place for AWS it shouldn't be too hard to enable it for other providers as well.

[mwhooker]

closed via #5998

[liberforce]

This was at first open for the ansible provisioner, and it ended fixed for the powershell provisioner but not the ansible, nor shell-local ones. As stated in #5998 :

that issue won't be truly addressed until you can also access this variable from the shell-local provisioner

As shell-local currently seems to be the recommanded way to call ansible, it should get this feature.
Please reopen.

[SwampDragons]

Good point I've opened separate tickets for each place we implement this, just to keep scope clear. I'll change the title of this one to be specific to Powershell.

[SwampDragons]

@liberforce if you'd like to test the patch enabling you to access the winrm password from the shell-local provisioner, check out #6251. I can build it for you if you let me know your host architecture.

[liberforce]

@SwampDragons : sorry for the late reply, I was out of office for the passed month. Thanks for your proposal, I'll be happy to test a binary if you can still provide it. I'm running an x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04.

[SwampDragons]

@liberforce you don't need a binary; this has been released and is in Packer 1.2.4

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