Config Not Required

communicator (string) - Packer currently supports three kinds of communicators:

• none - No communicator will be used. If this is set, most provisioners also can't be used.

• ssh - An SSH connection will be established to the machine. This is usually the default.

• winrm - A WinRM connection will be established.

In addition to the above, some builders have custom communicators they can use. For example, the Docker builder has a "docker" communicator that uses docker exec and docker cp to execute scripts and copy files.

pause_before_connecting (duration string | ex: "1h5m2s") - We recommend that you enable SSH or WinRM as the very last step in your guest's bootstrap script, but sometimes you may have a race condition where you need Packer to wait before attempting to connect to your guest.

If you end up in this situation, you can use the template option pause_before_connecting. By default, there is no pause. For example if you set pause_before_connecting to 10m Packer will check whether it can connect, as normal. But once a connection attempt is successful, it will disconnect and then wait 10 minutes before connecting to the guest and beginning provisioning.