Packer: Allow include/exclude for file provisioner

[steviecoaster]

It seems #1811 was closed as won't fix for....no other reason than it would be confusing.

This is a misstep as having that functionality would severely improve the usability of the file provisioner, without having to have multiple steps or convoluted shell/powershell code to clean up after it.

Please consider adding this feature.

[vexx32]

Aside-meta-note: closing issues as "wontfix" with a version target is fundamentally confusing and sends mixed messages. By all means, target for whatever future version, but closing it is a pretty clear "not gonna happen".

But yeah, please provide for this. I'd like to be able to upload the contents of a git repo without having to wait half an hour for it to slowly upload the .git hidden folder and then have to delete it after the fact. This is a basic useability feature, I don't know how y'all failed to include it in the initial implementation.

[azr]

Hello there, thanks for opening; I think this should be solved with the hcl2 fileset function !

[SwampDragons]

I think you're right that the rationale for having closed the original issue was weak. This would be a nice UI improvement.

Probably the right way to address this in the provisioner itself rather than the hcl2 fileset function would be to change the UploadDir call here https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/blob/master/provisioner/file/provisioner.go#L180 to a directory-walking function that checks against an "exlcude" list that the user can pass in as an option to the provisioner.

Since it does look like HCL provides a built-in solution for this, I probably won't direct the Packer team to work on it, but I'd be happy to review a community PR that does this.

[NoahAndrews]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any way to exclude specific files or directories using HCL2's fileset. I'd be happy to switch to HCL2 if it can provide an actual solution.

[azr]

Hello there, yes sorry, my previous message was rather short.

The HCL fileset function allows to specifically and recursively select files with a glob pattern. So it's only 'include' but it can be exclusive depending on how you call it, so to take the docs page example, if you have:

> tree pkr-consul
pkr-consul
├── build-linux.pkr.hcl
└── linux
    ├── files
    │   ├── hello.txt
    │   └── world.txt
    └── scripts
        ├── README.txt
        ├── script.bash
        ├── script-1-install.sh
        └── script-2-setup.sh

And you only want the .txt suffixed files, you can do:

$ echo 'fileset("**", "*.txt")' | packer console pkr-consul
[
  "../files/hello.txt",
  "../files/world.txt",
  "../linux/scripts/README.txt",
]

or only .sh suffixed files in linux/scripts:

$ echo 'fileset("linux/scripts", "*.sh")' | packer console pkr-consul
[
  "script-1-install.sh",
  "script-2-setup.sh",
]

I'd advise on sorting the fileset after this because fileset will not sort anything ( so depending on how your filesystem works this _might_ differ).

packer console will help you find the best solution.

If that does not help you to solve your problem; please describe your issue a bit more so that we can help you better 🙂