Work with remotes?

[ethanmdavidson]

This plugin currently only operates on the local repository and doesn't interact with remotes. I want this plugin to stay simple, so I don't want to throw in a feature that hasn't been fully thought out. We need to think about:

• what are the use cases for this feature? what alternatives/workarounds are available?
  • git clone provisioner
• how to handle multiple remotes?
• how should remotes affect output? (e.g. for listing branches, should we list 'origin/branchName' or just 'branchName')

[gardar]

Is this data source plugin mainly thought to be used to provide git information and not perform any other git operations? Would love to be able to do a actual git clone of a remote repo.

[ethanmdavidson]

The goal of this plugin is to integrate packer and git, so I'm open to pretty much anything :) There are only data sources right now since those were the only piece I needed myself, but cloning a remote repo would also be a good feature!

I think that would be a provisioner, right? I'm assuming you want to clone the repo onto the VM that's being provisioned.

I don't have a lot of time right now so I can't build this out myself, but I will definitely welcome a PR for a git clone provisioner if you want to take a crack at it.

[gardar]

Well I can see use cases for both a git clone provisioner and as a datasource, my idea was to use a git datasource to be able to to pull in scripts, etc. from a different repo to use in the build.
Sure it could be done in a ci pipeline or with a git submodule, but still it would be nice to be able to do it in the packer template.