Packer upload doesn't work in circleci docker containers

Build Environment
1

I’m using packer to build docker images and it works locally but it fails in circleci when trying to upload files into the docker container I’m building.

A minimal example is a to touch a “testfile” then use a packer.json like this:

  "builders": [ {
    "type": "docker",
    "image": "ubuntu",
    "export_path": "image.tar"
  } ],
  "provisioners": [{ "type": "file", "source":"testfile","destination":"/tmp"}]
}```
I've tried docker 1.8 and 1.9 with the circleci-cp-workaround branch. And both packer .9 and .8, but none of them seem to work.

Is there something about the circleci docker environment that prevents this from working? Is there a workaround?
2

I’m running into the same issues where Packer build fails at the first shell script provisioner.

I tried with the 1.9.1 and 1.10.0 CircleCI Docker versions), both without luck.

ubuntu@box243:~/Packer$ docker version
Client:
 Version:      1.10.0-circleci
 API version:  1.22
 Go version:   go1.5.3
 Git commit:   543ec7b-unsupported
 Built:        Tue Feb 16 17:11:12 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

Server:
 Version:      1.10.0-circleci
 API version:  1.22
 Go version:   go1.5.3
 Git commit:   543ec7b-unsupported
 Built:        Tue Feb 16 17:11:12 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

The error I receive is

2016/06/08 07:18:12 ui error:
==> Some builds didn't complete successfully and had errors:
2016/06/08 07:18:12 machine readable: docker,error []string{"Retryable error: Error uploading script: Upload failed with non-zero exit status: 255"}
2016/06/08 07:18:12 ui error: --> docker: Retryable error: Error uploading script: Upload failed with non-zero exit status: 255

I don’t know the internals much, but I read on the forum something about docker exec vs docker attach and issues with LXC, could that be the cause of this?

3

I have the same issue.

Minimum, reproducable repo: https://github.com/gfx/packer-on-docker-on-circleci2