support more than us-west-2

[rustyrazorblade]

The packer config is hard coded to us-west-2.

I think this should come after #22, but it might not have to. I don't know packer well enough yet to be confident about implementation.

[jrwest]

init now supports more than us-west-2 after the fix in c01a1b3

[arodrime]

Hi Jon. I've been falling for this one today, trying to go get back to easy-cass-lab :).

@jrwest, I think jon is speaking about Packer and building the initial AM, specifically here: https://github.com/rustyrazorblade/easy-cass-lab/blob/main/packer/base.pkr.hcl#L17

and here: https://github.com/rustyrazorblade/easy-cass-lab/blob/main/packer/base.pkr.hcl#L17

@rustyrazorblade, I am not familiar with packer, would there be a way to use the region configured in the AWS profile?

[rustyrazorblade]

Hey @arodrime ! I'm happy to see you here :)

Regarding the packer build, you're correct, that's what I was looking at. There's some high level stuff I should mention in addition to the config you spotted. You're correct in pointing out that issue. Extracting the region to a variable (https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/guides/hcl/variables) should be a straightforward improvement, something like:

variable "region" {
  type = string
  default = "us-west-2"
}

Regarding the AWS config, one thing I should mention is issue #22 , where we plan on moving the packer usage to a docker container, similar to how we use terraform. There's also #57 which will slightly alter how Terraform is used, right now we stick the creds right in the file and I want to stop doing that asap.

What I want to move to is to honor the region picked during the profile configuration, when the user puts in their credentials and selects a region. Right now they have to pick us-west-2 or it just doesn't work. Moving everything behind the user profile (and supporting multiple profiles as part of #136) will allow for much more flexible usage.

So, I know that's a lot of stuff. Initially dealing with the hard coded variable in packer is a good start, because we can pass the region in using -var "region=us-east-1" when running packer, and that can continue on when we put it behind docker.

If you're interested in contributing the patch to address the variable side of packer I'd be happy to merge it!

[rustyrazorblade]

I've added the region variable to the packer config. I haven't tried it yet but I think you should be able to build the AMI in a different DC by using an AWS profile in that DC along with -var "region=us-east-1" or whatever you want.

There's more to do here, so leaving this open.

[jrwest]

Regarding building an image in a region you can pass --region to build-image, build-base, or build-cassandra

[rustyrazorblade]

I'm pretty sure we can close this. Iirc setup-profile asks for region. @claude ?

[claude]

Claude finished @rustyrazorblade's task in 44s —— View job

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Investigation complete

• Check setup-profile command for region handling
• Check packer configs for region variable support
• Verify build commands support --region flag

Yes, this can be closed. Here's what the code shows:

1. setup-profile prompts for region (SetupProfile.kt:146):

   val region = promptIfMissing(existingConfig, "region", "What AWS region do you use?", "us-west-2")

2. AMI builds use the configured region (SetupProfile.kt:506):

   buildArgs.region = userConfig.region

   So when setup-profile triggers a packer AMI build, it passes the user's configured region.

3. Both packer configs are parameterized — packer/base/base.pkr.hcl and packer/cassandra/cassandra.pkr.hcl both have a region variable (defaulting to us-west-2 but overridable), and it's wired into the source "amazon-ebs" block.

4. --region flag is supported on build commands per the previous comment from @jrwest.

The original hard-coding is fully resolved — the region flows from setup-profile → user config → BuildImage → packer variable. This issue can be closed.