How do I provision a Windows Docker container with Ansible?
I've always had issues with using ansible to provision Windows machines with Packer due to the winrm connections breaking, example issue.

A workaround which you can do is to use the shell-local on your host machine which calls the Ansible playbook with the new host (although you would need to give it the IP address of your Windows Docker machine).

I've added the example which I did to get a test working. This uploads ip.cmd to the Windows virtual machine, which gets its IP address, and is then downloaded back to the destination. The ansible playbook is then called against that.

"provisioners": [
        {
            "type": "file",
            "source": "ip.cmd",
            "destination": "C:/tmp/ip.cmd"
        },
        {
            "type": "windows-shell",
            "inline": [
                "echo [{{ user `ansible_group` }}] &gt; C:/tmp/hosts",
                "C:/tmp/ip.cmd"
            ]
        },
        {
            "type": "file",
            "direction": "download",
            "source": "C:/tmp/hosts",
            "destination": "./ansible/hosts"
        },
        {
            "type": "shell-local",
            "command": "ANSIBLE_CONFIG=./ansible.cfg ansible-playbook -v -i ./ansible/hosts -l \"{{ user `ansible_group` }}\" -e \"ansible_user={{ user `username` }} ansible_password={{ user `password` }} ansible_become_pass={{ user `password` }} ansible_port=5986 ansible_connection=winrm ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore \" ./ansible/site.yml"
        }


where ip.cmd gets the IP address of the Windows host:

@echo off
FOR /F "tokens=2,3" %%A IN ('ping %computername% -n 1 -4') DO IF "from"== "%%A" set "IP=%%~B"
echo %IP:~0,-1% &gt;&gt; C:/tmp/hosts


source