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28 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
---
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page_title: Introduction to Packer
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description: Packer is a community tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Learn about Packer benefits and how to get started.
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---
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# Introduction to Packer
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This introduction describes Packer benefits and how you can get started with it.
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## What is Packer?
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Packer is a community tool for creating identical machine images for multiple
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platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on
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every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images
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for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer does not replace configuration
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management like Chef or Puppet. In fact, when building images, Packer is able to
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use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.
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A _machine image_ is a single static unit that contains a pre-configured
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operating system and installed software which is used to quickly create new
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running machines. Machine image formats change for each platform. Some examples
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include AMIs for EC2, VMDK and VMX files for VMware, and OVF exports for VirtualBox.
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## HCP Packer
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For information about using HCP Packer to store metadata about build artifacts, refer to the
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[HCP Packer documentation](/hcp/docs/packer) or [sign into HCP](https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/sign-in) to explore HCP Packer features.
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