Nightly releases are snapshots of the development activity on the Packer project that may include new features and bug fixes scheduled for upcoming releases. These releases are made available to make it easier for users to test their existing build configurations against the latest Packer code base for potential issues or to experiment with new features, with a chance to provide feedback on ways to improve the changes before being released.

As these releases are snapshots of the latest code, you may encounter an issue compared to the latest stable release. Users are encouraged to run nightly releases in a non production environment. If you encounter an issue, please check our issue tracker to see if the issue has already been reported; if a report hasn't been made, please report it so we can review the issue and make any needed fixes.

Note: Nightly releases are only available via GitHub Releases, and artifacts are not codesigned or notarized. Distribution via other Release Channels such as the Releases Site or Homebrew is not yet supported.

1.14.2 (September 9, 2025)

✨ Features

• HCP Certificate Authentication Support – by @JenGoldstrich (#13435)
  Adds support for the HCP_CRED_FILE environment variable and removes restrictions on HCP_CLIENT_ID and HCP_CLIENT_SECRET when connecting builds to an HCP Packer registry.

• Upgrade Node.js to v22 – by @LeahMarieBush (#13450)
  Updates the Node.js version used for Packer website builds.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• fix(winrm): catch cmd err from winrm – by @anurag5sh in (#298)
  Improved reliability by catching WinRM remote shell failures during provisioning
• PowerShell wrapper cleanup – by @kp2099 (#13451)
  Removed the unused $result variable from the wrapper string.
• fix tests for shell and shell-local – by @kp2099 in (#300)
  Acceptance test fixes for shell and shell-local

🛠 Improvements

• Added workflow-dispatch and set PACKER_ACC_BUILDERS for acceptance tests – by @kp2099 (#13444)
• Improved spacing in hcl2template error messages – by @sbraz (#13453)
• Added callouts for HashiCorp-maintained plugins moving to releases.hashicorp.com – by @BrianMMcClain (#13438)

📦 Dependencies

• Bump github.com/ulikunitz/xz from 0.5.10 → 0.5.14 – by @dependabot (#13459)
• Bump golang.org/x/oauth2 from 0.13.0 → 0.27.0 – by @dependabot (#13460)
• Bump github.com/ulikunitz/xz from 0.5.10 → 0.5.15 – by @kp2099 (#13461)
• Bump github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-sdk from 0.6.2 → 0.6.3 – by @kp2099 (#13462)

👩‍💻 New Contributors

• @LeahMarieBush made their first contribution in #13450 🎉

1.14.1 (August 5, 2025)

BUG FIXES:

• core: Changes on the packer plugin installation process to ensure that the plugin is installed correctly.
  The releases binary from official site releases.hashicorp.com was not getting installed from a proxy server, which was addressed in this PR.
  GH-13439

1.14.0 (Upcoming...)

IMPROVEMENTS:

• core: Changes to pull official packer plugins binaries from official site (releases.hashicorp.com).
  This change allows Packer to automatically download and install official plugins from the HashiCorp official release site.
  This change standardizes our release process and ensures a more secure and reliable pipeline for plugin delivery.
  GH-13431

• core: Updated the docs related to packer provisioners
  GH-13412

• core/HCP: This change corrects the example docs to move the registry block to the top level of the template file
  GH-13427

• core: This update adds a new section explaining conditional expressions in HCL, including syntax, usage examples, and best practices for clarity and maintainability.
  The documentation covers how to use conditionals for default values, dynamic argument omission, and recommends using locals for complex logic.
  GH-13429

BUG FIXES:

• core: Fixes the default execute command for script and scripts to its original behavior from v1.12.0.
  The recent change to use the -File operator for script execution required adjustments that are addressed in this PR.
  GH-13422

SECURITY:

• Bump go-git from v5.13.0 to v5.16.2
  GH-13420

Fixed issues with powershell script execution by ensuring environment variables are correctly set, appending newline characters to prevent formatting-related errors, and updating acceptance tests to use regex matching for more reliable assertions.

Breaking Changes

Starting with Packer v1.13.1, the way PowerShell commands are executed has changed. Packer now uses the -File operator to run PowerShell scripts by default. As part of this update, Packer prepends certain preamble logic to the script before adding your script content.

The default command now looks like:

powershell -executionpolicy <execution_policy> -file {{.Path}}

Here, {{.Path}} refers to the path of the temporary script file generated by Packer. When using the script or scripts block, Packer injects the preamble logic at the top of this script file.

If your script relies on specific PowerShell constructs (such as module imports, parameter declarations, or function definitions) that must appear at the top of the script, we recommend wrapping your script content inside a function and invoking it. This helps avoid any conflicts or ordering issues introduced by the preamble logic.

1.13.0 (June 2, 2025)

FEATURES:

• core: Enhanced the existing inline field in the shell provisioner to support any script with its own shebang (#!).
  Allows users to provide scripts directly in the inline field, making it possible to use scripts generated by functions like templatefile.
  Ensures that the shell provisioner executes the given script as intended, honoring the script's shebang line.
  GH-13313

• core: Added new built-in functions to Packer:
  sum
  startswith
  endswith
  These new functions expand the capabilities for template logic and variable handling in Packer builds.
  GH-13349

IMPROVEMENTS:

• hcl2: Added the ability for the packer fmt command to format multiple HCL files at once.
  This enhancement allows users to format several files in a single command invocation.
  GH-13362

• hcl2: Added top level hcp_packer_registry block (this configuration was previously nested inside the build block and is still valid but deprecated) GH-13314

BUG FIXES:

• core: Updated the documentation to explicitly state that a trailing slash is required when uploading directories, regardless of the guest OS.
  This clarification is intended to ensure consistent behavior and prevent confusion, especially for Windows users.
  GH-13309

• core: Fixed an error occurring when using the --use-sequential-evaluation flag with packer console.
  Updated the FlagSets to correctly include this flag, resolving the error.
  GH-13316

• core: added a wrapper around inline PowerShell commands executed by the provisioner to catch errors and ensure the Packer build fails if any command results in an error. #13334

• hcl2: Ensures that Packer now preserves the user-defined order of variable files as input by the user.
  This change maintains the intended precedence of variables, honoring the order specified on the command line.
  GH-13350

SECURITY:

• Bump to go-crypto v0.36.0
  GH-13369

1.12.0 (January 22, 2025)

FEATURES:

• core: add support for a DAG-based evaluation on locals and datasources.
  A long-standing odditiy of Packer has been the order of evaluation for
  locals and data sources. In previous versions of Packer, the
  data sources were evaluated first, then the local variables were, making
  it impossible to have a datasource that referenced a local variable as
  part of its configuration.
  This change introduces a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to evaluate those
  resources, instead of the phased approach of old, which makes the order
  of evaluation not dependent on the type of resource, but instead of the
  detected dependencies between them.
  Note: While we are confident this should be robust enough for general
  use, we do recognise that it is possible some users might encounter issues.
  To give those users a way to continue using the old evaluation method, we
  introduced a -use-sequential-evaluation command-line flag to the build,
  validate, console and inspect subcommands, to force using the sequential
  evaluation approach for those entities.
  GH-13155

• core/hcp: support for uploading SBOMs to HCP Packer.
  Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) are a standardised way to export the various
  software packages linked to an artifact. As some users have expressed a
  need to produce and access those for images they build, we now add the
  feature to Packer itself.
  While the generation of the SBOM itself is not done directly by
  Packer, instead we recommend using known scanners to produce them, we add
  the capacity to upload this SBOM file to HCP Packer, and link it to a
  build artifact.
  GH-13171

• core: support for alternate serialisation formats for plugin communication.
  Packer relies on plugins to do most of the actual workload related to
  building and provisioing artifacts, while Packer is mostly an orchestrator
  for those plugins to perform their work.
  This separation of concerns implies that both entities have to
  communicate on multiple occasions during the course of a build.
  Before v1.12.0 of Packer, and v0.6.0 of the plugin SDK, we used Gob to
  do most of the serialisation for those steps.
  This is however a bit of a problem recently, as go-cty, the library we
  use for dynamic objects lifted from HCL templates, dropped support for
  this a while back.
  Therefore now, we introduce an alternative: protobuf/msgpack, which are
  both usable and maintained by the projects around Packer, so we can begin
  our transition away from gob with this change.
  Note: as with the introduction of the DAG for locals/datasources, this
  is a feature that we are reasonably confident you will not encounter bugs
  with, however we cannot rule-out this possibility, therefore we introduce
  a new environment variable: PACKER_FORCE_GOB, which if set to '1', forces
  the use of Gob instead of protobuf/msgpack.
  GH-13120

IMPROVEMENTS:

• hcl2/json: add aws_secretsmanager_raw funcion.
  When using the AWS secretsmanager function with a non-text secret, one could
  only get a secret once at a time.
  This could get cumbersome if wanting to get multiple through one request,
  which led people to encode their JSON/Object secrets as a big base64
  encoded string that they could get once, and then manipulate through JSON
  functions.
  While the workaround works, it is one extra layer of manipulations to do so,
  therefore a new function to always get the raw textual version of a secret
  is now added to Packer.
  GH-13242
• hcl2: add alltrue and anytrue functions.
  As with Terraform, Packer now supports the HCL functions alltrue and
  anytrue, which returns whether or not a collection only consists of
  true values, or if any is.
  GH-13237
• hcl2: add strcontains function.
  As with Terraform, Packer now supports the HCL function strcontains,
  which returns whether or not a string contains a substring within it.
  GH-13217
  GH-13222
• datasource/http: Support other methods than GET.
  The HTTP datasource used to always use GET requests for getting data
  from a remote HTTP server, which was not always enough since some endpoints
  may only support other methods. This change allows for most of the HTTP
  methods to perform those requests.
  GH-13190
• hcl2: add base64gzip function.
  In some cases, small blobs may need to be kept in memory, and injected in
  a template somewhere else, but if the blob needs to be minimised, the
  base64gzip function can be invoked to compress the blob and expose it
  as a valid HCL2 string for use later.
  GH-13142

BUG FIXES:

• hcl2: Fix duplicate error messages on top-level HCL violations.
  A parsing quirk for HCL templates caused Packer to produce the same parsing
  error multiple times if the error was caused by a top-level violation.
  GH-13245
• build: Include LC_UUID in Darwin binaries.
  A change in how Apple authorises a plugin to access the network caused
  Packer to break on recent (14.7 and above) macOS versions, as Packer uses
  the local network to communicate with plugins.
  The fix is to include an additional UUID into the metadata of the produced
  binary, so it is authorised by macOS to use the local network, which prompts
  an update to the version of Go used for building Packer (1.22.9), as it is
  when this addition is supported by an LDFLAG.
  GH-13214
• hcl2: Don't error on empty bucker slug.
  As reported by members of our community, using a hcp_packer_registry
  block without a bucket slug, even if provided by external means, would cause
  Packer to fail with an invalid bucket slug error. This is most definitely
  a bug, which is addressed in this release.
  GH-13210
• hcp: fix bug when trying to extract HEAD SHA from empty Git repo.
  GH-13165

SECURITY:

• Bump to go-crypto v0.31.0
  GH-13233

NOTES:

• docs: fix UUIDv4 example. A community user has found discrepancies in the
  UUIDv4 examples which were used in our docs, as they do not match the
  standard.
  GH-13229
• hcl2: fix slice initialisation method during variable evaluation phase.
  GH-13175

1.11.2 (July 30, 2024)

FEATURES

• core/hcp: export Packer options, OS, CI and VCS metadata for a build.
  Following up on the introduction of metadata for builds in Packer 1.11.0,
  this version introduces more metadata. In addition to the version of Packer
  core, and the plugins used, we now capture CI-specific environment variables
  (gitlab-ci and github-actions for now), Git-specific information, OS details
  like architecture and kernel version, and the command-line options passed
  to packer build.

1.11.1 (July 1, 2024)

NOTES:

• Future Scaffolding: This release contains additional changes that allow
  Packer core to validate access a HCP Packer bucket before trying to
  publish to it. If the bucket does not exist and the associated service
  principle does not have permission to create the bucket Packer will fail
  the build.GH-13059

SECURITY:

• core: Bump github.com/hashicorp/go-retryablehttp to address
  CVE-2024-6104.GH-13081

IMPROVEMENTS:

• core/hcl2: The issue is that local variables in templates are evaluated in a
  non-deterministic order, leading to inconsistent behavior. To fix this,
  local variables will now build a list of direct dependencies, similar to
  datasources, and evaluate these dependencies recursively. A caveat is that
  there's a recursion cap of 10 to prevent infinite recursion; if this limit
  is reached, an error is returned, prompting the user to fix their template.
  GH-13039
• core: bump github.com/hashicorp/hcp-sdk-go from 0.96.0 to 0.99.0
  GH-13063
• core: bump github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-sdk from 0.5.3 to 0.5.4
  GH-13061

BUG FIXES:

• core/hcp: Change UpsertBucket to call GetBucket to address unauthorized error
  from ustream API.
  GH-13059