Option to skip the image creation

[cah-ankur-singh03]

Hello Folks,
Can some one please let me know if there is an option in packer to skip/avoid the image creation?
I have a CI/CD pipeline where I am creating image using packer which works pretty great.

However i have another requirement where I have to leverage the same pipeline and offload some steps from Concourse worker by moving some heavy lifting to GCP VM where I can use packer to provision a VM and do the heavy lifting but I don't want to get an output of that packer build. Is there a way I can skip image creation and still do the task?

I will really appreciate some feedback/guidance on this thread.

thanks

[krishicks]

A solution to this that I've implemented is to wrap the run of packer build in a script that:

• removes any ami_users declaration, which prevents copying the AMI
• adds a manifest post-processor if one does not already exist in the packer-template.json
• uses the manifest post-processor output to find the artifacts that were created and uses the appropriate method to delete them

In the case of an amazon-ebs builder, the output is used to delete the AMI and associated snapshot with aws-cli.

I'd love to see this as a feature but it would need to be implemented by the provider as probably only the provider would know how to clean things up.

[SwampDragons]

For more context on similar issues opened for other builders, see #7209

[cah-ankur-singh03]

@krishicks thanks a lot for your suggestion. I will give it a try and see if that helps :)

[cah-ankur-singh03]

@SwampDragons thanks a lot for pointing me to this thread.

[ghost]

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