Packer strives to be stable and bug-free, but issues inevitably arise where certain things may not work entirely correctly, or may not appear to work correctly. In these cases, it is sometimes helpful to see more details about what Packer is actually doing.
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# Debugging Packer
# Debugging Packer Builds
Packer strives to be stable and bug-free, but issues inevitably arise where
certain things may not work entirely correctly, or may not appear to work
correctly. In these cases, it is sometimes helpful to see more details about
what Packer is actually doing.
For remote builds with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services AMIs, debugging
a Packer build can be eased greatly with `packer build -debug`. This disables
parallelization and enables debug mode.
Debug mode informs the builders that they should output debugging information.
The exact behavior of debug mode is left to the builder. In general, builders
usually will stop between each step, waiting for keyboard input before
continuing. This will allow you to inspect state and so on.
In debug mode once the remote instance is instantiated, Packer will emit to the
current directory an emphemeral private ssh key as a .pem file. Using that you
can `ssh -i <key.pem>` into the remote build instance and see what is going on
for debugging. The emphemeral key will be deleted at the end of the packer run
during cleanup.
### Windows
As of Packer 0.8.1 the default WinRM communicator will emit the password for a
Remote Desktop Connection into your instance. This happens following the several
minute pause as the instance is booted. Note a .pem key is still created for
securely transmitting the password. Packer automatically decrypts the password
for you in debug mode.
## Debugging Packer
Issues occasionally arise where certain things may not work entirely correctly,
or may not appear to work correctly. In these cases, it is sometimes helpful to
see more details about what Packer is actually doing.
Packer has detailed logs which can be enabled by setting the `PACKER_LOG`
environmental variable to any value. This will cause detailed logs to appear
on stderr. The logs contain log messages from Packer as well as any plugins
that are being used. Log messages from plugins are prefixed by their application
name.
environmental variable to any value like this `PACKER_LOG=1 packer build
<config.json>`. This will cause detailed logs to appear on stderr. The logs
contain log messages from Packer as well as any plugins that are being used. Log
messages from plugins are prefixed by their application name.
Note that because Packer is highly parallelized, log messages sometimes
appear out of order, especially with respect to plugins. In this case,
