Is it possible to locate the temp keypair generated by Packer?
First, make sure that packer runs in debug mode (packer build -debug ...), otherwise the temporary key will not be written to disk but will only be kept in memory.

packer will store the key in its working directory. In other words, look in the same directory from which you started the packer process.

If you use AWS, the file will be called ec2_amazon-ebs.pem. Assuming you are building an Ubuntu image, you should be able to login to the instance with this command:

ssh -i ec2_amazon-ebs.pem ubuntu@&lt;ip&gt;


(where &lt;ip&gt; can be found in the packer output or through the AWS console)