Get AMI ID from a packer build

packer-ami-id

packer build packer.json 2>&1 | sudo tee output.txt
tail -2 output.txt | head -2 | awk 'match($0, /ami-.*/) { print substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH) }' > sudo ami.txt

Gist is one of those sites where it pays to read the comments. I was able to take this and combine it with some of the above additional techniques and wrap it together in a modern AWS demonstration. Enjoy: https://gist.github.com/electrawn/be0c239e46517a859e31bf0a2496235e

Using a post-processor with jq works as well.

jq -r '.builds[0].artifact_id|split(":")[1]' ./manifest.json

Seriously, we shouldn't have to do all this parsing of text. Packer should just have a way to spit out the ami_id in the language itself so we can use it in future build stages without having to parse arrays in json manifest files

@CodeForcer yes, definitely I agree!!!

Complete example using HCL with a manifest post-processor and the jq command from @dougireton:

packer {
  required_plugins {
    amazon = {
      version = ">= 0.0.2"
      source  = "github.com/hashicorp/amazon"
    }
  }
}

source "amazon-ebs" "ubuntu" {
  ami_name      = "custom-ami-{{timestamp}}"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  region        = "eu-west-1"
  source_ami_filter {
    filters = {
      name                = "ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-jammy-22.04-amd64-server-*"
      root-device-type    = "ebs"
      virtualization-type = "hvm"
    }
    most_recent = true
    owners      = ["099720109477"]
  }
  ssh_username = "ubuntu"
  tags = {
    Name = "my-app"
    Os   = "ubuntu-jammy-22.04-amd64-server"
  }
}

build {
  name = "custom-ami"
  sources = ["source.amazon-ebs.ubuntu"]
    post-processor "manifest" {
        output = "manifest.json"
        strip_path = true
    }
}

Then just:
jq -r '.builds[0].artifact_id|split(":")[1]' ./manifest.json
Expected output:
ami-0dcbaf6794c89f392

But agree with @CodeForcer 2022 and packer still does not have a built-in method to spit out the id.

For multiple AWS regions, try:

jq -r '.builds[0].artifact_id' ./manifest.json | tr ',' '\n'