Packer plugin install hitting rate limiting issues

[nywilken]

It would be great if packer would support a way of mirroring the registry. Relying on GitHub only really works well locally, but not when you are doing 100s of builds every day and get rate limited.

Originally posted by @lifeofguenter in #11223 (comment)

[jgerry2002]

+1 for this. The entire implementation seems half thought out and incomplete. Why a decision was made to enforce external plugins in the latest packer version without fixing known issues like this is confusing.

The weird directory structure is also confusing and misleading. Yes its documented, but why this approach?
hashicorp/packer-plugin-vsphere#288

Yes you can "get a github api token" but that is a half a solution.

And yes you can copy the plugin directly into the packer directory. But that isnt very clean when its another github project for something like a github action or runner that creates itself with every job.

There is another issue here that describes the headache:
#11164

"Eventually" - perhaps now is the time to consider this?

Another possible way to solve this would be to reference a binary directly from an artifact server without the need to duplicate the entire repo. Some organizations have policies that don't let you pull outside code without at least cloning it internally first. Maybe that would be easier to implement?