Path variables

This topic provides reference information about path variables for Packer templates written in HCL.

Description

Use the following variables to build paths:

• path.cwd: the directory from where Packer was started.

• path.root: the directory of the input HCL file or the input folder.

Examples

locals {
  settings_file  = "${path.cwd}/settings.txt"
  scripts_folder = "${path.root}/scripts"
  root           = path.root
}

Path separators

Separate paths with a forward slash (/), especially when using relative paths in your configuration. Windows uses backward slashes (\) to separate paths, but Packer only recognizes / as path separators when it creates builds from any non-Windows system. Packer also treat backslashes as plain text, which could lead to errors.

Related functions

• abspath takes a string containing a filesystem path and converts it to an absolute path.

• basename returns only the last portion of a filesystem path, discarding the portion that would be returned by dirname.

• fileset enumerates a set of regular file names given a path and pattern.

• dirname returns all of the segments of a filesystem path except the last, discarding the portion that would be returned by basename.