Jenkins

Another quicky.

I read here that cool trick to convert HTML entities to plain text:

alias htmldecode="perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities(\$_)'"

In a Debian based system, this suppose to apt-get install libhtml-parser-perl. Why bother you may ask? Well because the (awful) Jenkins-cli outputs text areas content in encoded HTML entities, and for example I like the idea of being able to test a standalone packer template that’s failing.

Finally, here’s the full usecase:

Quick one.

While working on a build chain in order to register home-baked AMIs, I wanted to use the ansible-local packer provisioner to setup the instance with a very basic playbook. I needed to provide ansible a playbook but didn’t find immediately how to achieve this within the Jenkins-packer module. Turns out it’s tricky, in the JSON Template Text (or the template file), declare the playbook_file like this:

  [{
    "type": "ansible-local",
    "playbook_file": "{{ user `test_yml` }}",
    "command": "PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ansible-playbook"
  }]

Then in the File Entries field, the Variable Name must be test_yml and File Contents filled with the playbook.