Shell, File, and Ansible Provisioners

This is the hands-on lab for Section 7 of Packer 101. You write an amazon-ebs template that bakes on t3.small, uploads a configure script with the file provisioner, runs it with shell, installs ansible-core 2.21.4 on the guest (PEP 668 pip with --break-system-packages), then uses ansible-local to install nginx. One deliberate optional shell step is marked continue_on_error so the build continues after a non-zero exit. You intentionally break a provisioner path, read the validate error, and fix it. After the bake you prove the AMI with the AWS CLI, then fmt and validate Azure and GCP sidecar templates that reuse the same provisioner chain without building them. Cleanup deregisters the AMI and deletes its EBS snapshot.

You will:

• Confirm Packer 1.16.0 and AWS credentials on the lab host
• Author aws-ubuntu.pkr.hcl with amazon ~> 1.8, ansible ~> 1.1, and t3.small
• Stage scripts/configure-app.sh and playbooks/nginx.yml, then init, fmt, and

validate

• Recover from a deliberate broken playbook and file path
• Build the AMI, prove it, and validate Azure/GCP sidecars that share the

provisioner blocks

• Deregister the AMI and delete its snapshot