Using ansible as a packer provisioner

Ansible Galaxy workaround

The packer provisioner provides a bit of unconvenience when it comes to handling the ansible-galaxy command. There are options you can use like galaxy_command, galaxy_force_with_deps and galaxy_file, but there seems to be no option to disable dependencies. This can lead to trouble when a collection is pinned to an old version of some other collection you want to use with a newer release.

This is how packer executes the ansible-galaxy command:

<GALAXY_COMMAND> collection install -r <GALAXY_FILE>

You can’t add options to the galaxy_command, because packer adds the collection install -r part and therefore adding flags to the galaxy_command results in an error. To work around that you can use a custom script as the galaxy_command, or remove the galaxy_xyz stuff and just run a full command on the galaxy_command option. For example you could do:

galaxy_command = "ansible-galaxy install -r ${path.cwd}/ansible/my-requirements.yml --no-deps"