Allow remote OVF downloads

[toddsampson]

Any plans to allow for remote ovf file downloads with an ovf_url, along with the corresponding vmdk, as you did with iso_url?

I want to send the team a packer config that uses a hosted ovf base box, makes some customizations using provisioning scripts, and then builds a Vagrant box.

[rasa]

So each team member needs to run provision steps that are unique to that team member?

[michaelmior]

+1 for this. It would be nice not to need something external to Packer to download the image.

[mitchellh]

This sounds good to me. Tagged.

[russroy]

+1

[richardzone]

+1

[gamename]

+1

[cbednarski]

I think this should be fairly easy to do with go-getter, which can support getting all the bits out of a zip file.

[kotatsu360]

+1

[artburkart]

To @cbednarski's point, what would the implementation of this look like?

I could see source_path being overridden, so it can accept a url to an ova archive file, but an ovf seems less doable unless some opinionated convention is selected.

[cbednarski]

@artburkart I think for the ovf case we would say it must be in a tar or zip, and it will be extracted after we download it. You're right though that without an archive of some kind there is no way to know which files are supposed to be included.