Lint for Packer?

[cfsb-jrose]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We use megalinter as part of our code quality pipeline. Are there plans to add support for linting packer (e.g. *.pkr.hcl) files?

Describe the solution you'd like
Add support to lint packer build templates. Can be included in either terraform or security ML flavor.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Could not identify alternative

Additional context
N/A

[nvuillam]

@cfsb-jrose this is an interesting suggestion :)

Do you know how to analyse packer config files ? I quickly searched but did not find an open source linter ( https://github.com/mschuchard/linter-packer-validate seems not very active )

[cfsb-jrose]

I might need to answer a question with another question. Are there lint tools not in maintenance mode? Packer uses one of two languages in its scripts: HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) or JSON.

[cfsb-jrose]

Perhaps add support for running these?

• packer fmt
• packer inspect
• packer validate

[nvuillam]

@cfsb-jrose that could be done :)

Would you like to try first with a MegaLinter plugin ? :)

https://megalinter.io/latest/plugins/

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[wesley-dean]

We could add a PACKER descriptor with linters for the different tool uses:

• PACKER_VALIDATE: run packer validate on *.pkr.hcl and capture lines like these with cli_lint_errors_regex :

Errors validating build 'vmware'. 1 error(s) occurred:

• PACKER_FMT: run packer fmt on *.pkr.hcl with the is_formatter MegaLinter descriptor flag set

I looked at packer inspect and saw that it can be used to validate the syntax of a template:

The command doesn't validate the actual configuration of the various components (that is what the validate command is for), but it will validate the syntax of your template by necessity.

My interpretation is that packer inspect only provides a subset of the packer validate functionality.

Is that fair?

If so, @nvuillam , is it possible for a plugin to provide a completely new descriptor?

[nvuillam]

@wesley-dean all plugins are completely new descriptors, so yes :)

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