I use Ansible as provisioner for Packer, to build AMIs to be used as a base image of our development environment. When Ansible is used by Packer, it’s not quite intuitive whether it’s using the same ansible.cfg when I run ansible-playbook command in a terminal.

Here’s how to make sure Ansible in Packer session will use the correct ansible.cfg file. 

First, an ENV is supplied in Packer’s template, because ENV precedes any other configuration that can be found:

    {
      "type": "ansible",
      "playbook_file": "../../ansible/apps.yml",
      "ansible_env_vars": ["ANSIBLE_CONFIG=/tmp/ansible.cfg"],
      "extra_arguments": [
        "--skip-tags=packer-skip",
        "-vvv"
      ]
    },

The line with “ANSIBLE_CONFIG=/tmp/ansible.cfg” will tell ansible to use /tmp/ansible.cfg.

With the ansible.cfg at /tmp, and the extra debug switch -vvv I can see in the output if the config file is picked up.