Can user variables be used in external files i.e. autounattend.xml

[michaelosmith]

I am building windows servers and the flexibility of using user variables is great.
I was wondering if it is possible to apply a user variable into the Autounattend.xml file that is used to automate the setup of windows machines?

[kikitux]

Hello,

At the moment files in http, floppy or uploaded with packer file provisioning are copied as is.

At somepoint you may call an powershell script and modify tokens:

For examples, have a look here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17144355/string-replace-file-content-with-powershell

Use (V3 version):

(gc c:\temp\test.txt).replace('[MYID]', 'MyValue') | sc c:\temp\test.txt
Or for V2:

(gc c:\temp\test.txt) -replace '\[MYID\]', 'MyValue'

[michaelosmith]

thanks @kikitux, that makes sense.
I'll see if I can put something together.

[deluxebrain]

Hi @michaelosmith - just wondering if you got anywhere with using variables inside autounattend ? I'm using a hacky solution of pre-transforming a templated autounattend file into a temp file that is reference from the packer build command. Works fine - but not very elegant and can lead to the temp file lying around.

[ryanwischkaemper]

@deluxebrain I'm about to do the same thing. I agree that it is slightly hacky, but it beats having to update the same value across several files every time a change comes along.

[mwhooker]

going to close as a dupe of #3961 etc. Will track in a meta-issue I'm creating

[michaelosmith]

@deluxebrain I managed to solve this by using the following basic script.

param(
[string]$hostname
)

$ScriptDir = Split-Path -parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path

(Get-Content $ScriptDir\answer_files\Autounattend_template.xml).replace('[HOSTNAME]', $hostname) | Set-Content $ScriptDir\answer_files\Autounattend.xml
$exe = "C:\Windows\System32\packer.exe"
&$exe build -var-file="variables.json" -var "vm_name=$hostname" template.json

It is just powershell that takes in a hostname parameter (that's all I wanted to change) and then replaces my template value and creates a new Autounattend.xml.

I am sure this could be repeated for many different variables.
A bit hacky but it works for me :-)