Tags format on Packer ec2-ami deployment - tags

Question

I'm trying out to create an amazon ec2 ami for the 1st time using Hashicorp Packer, however getting this failure on the tag creation, I already tried some retries on trial and error test for the format but still unlucky
[ec2-boy-oh-boy#ip-172-168-99-23 pogi]$ packer init .
Error: Missing item separator
on variables.pkr.hcl line 28, in variable "tags":
27: default = [
28: "environment" : "testing"
Expected a comma to mark the beginning of the next item.
My code ec2.pkr.hcl looks like this:
[ec2-boy-oh-boy#ip-172-168-99-23 pogi]$ cat ec2.pkr.hcl
packer {
required_plugins {
amazon = {
version = ">= 0.0.2"
source = "github.com/hashicorp/amazon"
}
}
}
source "amazon-ebs" "ec2" {
ami_name = "${var.ami_prefix}-${local.timestamp}"
instance_type = "t2.micro"
region = "us-east-1"
vpc_id = "${var.vpc}"
subnet_id = "${var.subnet}"
security_group_ids = ["${var.sg}"]
ssh_username = "ec2-boy-oh-boy"
source_ami_filter {
filters = {
name = "amzn2-ami-hvm-2.0*"
root-device-type = "ebs"
virtualization-type = "hvm"
}
most_recent = true
owners = ["12345567896"]
}
launch_block_device_mappings = [
{
"device_name": "/dev/xvda",
"delete_on_termination": true
"volume_size": 10
"volume_type": "gp2"
}
]
run_tags = "${var.tags}"
run_volume_tags = "${var.tags}"
}
build {
sources = [
"source.amazon-ebs.ec2"
]
}
[ec2-boy-oh-boy#ip-172-168-99-23 pogi]$
Then my code variables.pkr.hcl looks like this:
[ec2-boy-oh-boy#ip-172-168-99-23 pogi]$ cat variables.pkr.hcl
locals {
timestamp = regex_replace(timestamp(), "[- TZ:]", "")
}
variable "ami_prefix" {
type = string
default = "ec2-boy-oh-boy"
}
variable "vpc" {
type = string
default = "vpc-asd957d"
}
variable "subnet" {
type = string
default = "subnet-asd957d"
}
variable "sg" {
type = string
default = "sg-asd957d"
}
variable "tags" {
type = map
default = [
environment = "testing"
type = "none"
production = "later"
]
}

Answer 1

Your default value for the tags variable is of type list(string). Both the run_tags and run_volume_tags directives expect type map[string]string.
I was able to make the following changes to your variables file and run packer init successfully:
variable "tags" {
default = {
environment = "testing"
type = "none"
production = "later"
}
type = map(string)
}