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* replace .io links with devdot links * update links in website docs readme
48 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
48 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
---
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description: >
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Packer and the Packer documentation uses a vocabulary of terms that have specific meaning. Learn about Packer terminology in this glossary.
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page_title: Packer terminology
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---
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# Packer terminology
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This page documents terminology we use throughout this documentation that have a specific meaning in Packer. These terms may not be immediately obvious if you have not used Packer before.
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- _Artifacts_ are the results of a single build, and are usually a set of IDs
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or files to represent a machine image. Every builder produces a single
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artifact. As an example, in the case of the Amazon EC2 builder, the
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artifact is a set of AMI IDs (one per region). For the VMware builder, the
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artifact is a directory of files comprising the created virtual machine.
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- _Builds_ are a single task that eventually produces an artifact for a single
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platform. Multiple builds run in parallel. Example usage in a sentence:
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"The Packer build produced an AMI to run our web application." Or: "Packer
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is running the builds now for VMware, AWS, and VirtualBox."
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- _Builders_ are components of Packer that are able to create a machine image
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for a single platform. Builders read in some configuration and use that to
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run and generate a machine image. A builder is invoked as part of a build
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in order to create the actual resulting artifacts. Example builders include
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VirtualBox, VMware, and Amazon EC2.
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- _Commands_ are sub-commands for the `packer` program that perform a job.
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An example command is "build", which is invoked as `packer build`. Packer
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ships with a set of commands out of the box in order to define its
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command-line interface.
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- _Data sources_ are components of Packer that fetch data from outside Packer
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and make it available to use within the template.
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Example of data sources include Amazon AMI, and Amazon Secrets Manager.
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- _Post-processors_ are components of Packer that take the result of a
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builder or another post-processor and process that to create a new
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artifact. Examples of post-processors are compress to compress artifacts,
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upload to upload artifacts, etc.
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- _Provisioners_ are components of Packer that install and configure software
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within a running machine prior to that machine being turned into a static
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artifact. They perform the major work of making the artifact contain useful
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software. Example provisioners include shell scripts, Chef, Puppet, etc.
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- _Templates_ are files that define one or more builds by configuring various Packer components. Packer reads a template and uses the information to create multiple machine images in parallel. You can write templates in HCL or JSON files format.
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