How to make packer chef-solo provisioner skip installing Chef conditionally?

Question

I am using packer to provision AWS instance to multiple regions. Due to network issues on cn-north-1 region, I don't want chef-solo provisioner install Chef from the official site as the downloading speed is extremely slow, and sometimes disconnected. Instead I would upload the .deb file to s3 bucket beforehand and install from there during the provisioning. I know that there is a "skip_install(boolean)", but how can I make something like this:

"type": "chef-solo",
"skip_install": {{"region"=="cn-north-1"}},

Is it supported?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would probably use packer's file provisioner to upload the .deb file, and then replace the install_command with whatever would install that .deb package for you

so probably something along the lines of "install_command": "sudo dpkg -i DEB_PACKAGE" ;)