Overview of the Issue

When using the googlecompute builder in packer 1.5.4 the {{.WinRMPassword}} does not contain any data in the provisioners stages. This cases an issue when trying to execute ansible-playbook from a shell-local provisioner as you don't know what the WinRM password has been set too.

This problem does not happen older versions of packer e.g. 1.4.5.

Reproduction Steps

Run packer build template.json

template.json contains the following:

{
    "builders": [
      {
        "type": "googlecompute",
        "account_file": "account.json",
        "project_id": "packer-gcp",
        "source_image": "windows-server-2019-dc-v20200211",
        "communicator": "winrm",
        "disk_size": "50",
        "winrm_username": "packer_user",
        "winrm_insecure": true,
        "winrm_use_ssl": true,
        "ssh_username": "packer",
        "zone": "europe-west2-a",
        "metadata": {
            "windows-startup-script-cmd": "winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic=\"true\"}"
        }
      }
    ],
    "provisioners": [
        {
            "type": "shell-local",
            "command": "echo {{.WinRMPassword}}"
        }
    ]
  }

The shell output for WinRMPassword will be blank in packer 1.5.4 but in 1.4.5 it will contain the correctly generated password.

Packer version

From 1.5.4

Operating system and Environment details

This is the case when running packer from both a Windows and Linux environment.