leocp1 / packer-provisioner-fakessh

fakessh Provisioner

Type: fakessh

The fakessh Packer provisioner is a modification of the shell-local provisioner that provides a fake ssh command that forwards its arguments to the Communicator. It's intended for use in commands like nix and git that use ssh to access remote servers.

This is a bit of a hack: consider using the Host, Port, User, Password, SSHPublicKey and SSHPrivateKey functions provided by the Template Engine instead. One main advantage of using a system ssh directly instead of this provisioner is support for gzip compression, which is currently unimplemented in the Go ssh library:

Basic Example

{
  "type": "fakessh",
  "inline": [
    "nix-copy-closure --to user@server /nix/store/hashofmynixossystemconfiguration-nixos-system-hostname-version"
  ]
}

nix-copy-closure internally calls ssh user@server "nix-daemon --stdio". The provisioner will change the PATH variable so that ssh points to a fake ssh command. The fake ssh command will ignore the destination and any command line flags and forward the "nix-daemon --stdio" command to the Packer Communicator. (fakessh doesn't support interactive ssh sessions.)

Configuration Reference

The configuration options are the same as the shell-local provisioner.

If the provisioner is reporting it can not find the ssh directory,

• Run go build github.com/leocp1/packer-provisioner-fakessh/cmd/ssh
• Set PACKER_FAKE_SSH_EXECUTABLE_PATH to the parent directory of the fake ssh executable produced

Acceptance test

Running the acceptance test requires

• Copying or symlinking the build directory of the Packer repository to the root directory of this repository
• Setting PACKER_FAKE_SSH_EXECUTABLE_PATH to the parent directory of the fake ssh executable
• Setting ACC_TEST_BUILDERS to the builders to run the test on
• Setting ACC_TEST_PROVISIONERS to include fakessh,shell
• Running go test ./pkg/provisioner

See Also

• packer-provisioner-tunnel

Licenses

The file ./pkg/ctxio/ctxio.go in this repository contains an adaptation of functions published in "Cancelling I/O in Go Cap'n Proto" by Ross Light (link) which was licensed under the CC BY 4.0 License.

All other Go source files (files with extension .go) in this repository are licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

All Nix files (files with extension .nix) in this repository are licensed under the MIT License.