2020-03-18 18:46:47 -04:00
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---
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description: >
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There are a handful of terms used throughout the Packer documentation where
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the
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meaning may not be immediately obvious if you haven't used Packer before.
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Luckily, there are relatively few. This page documents all the terminology
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required to understand and use Packer. The terminology is in alphabetical
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order
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for quick referencing.
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page_title: Terminology
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2020-04-02 19:39:47 -04:00
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sidebar_title: Terminology
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2020-03-18 18:46:47 -04:00
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---
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# Packer Terminology
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There are a handful of terms used throughout the Packer documentation where the
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meaning may not be immediately obvious if you haven't used Packer before.
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Luckily, there are relatively few. This page documents all the terminology
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required to understand and use Packer. The terminology is in alphabetical order
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for quick referencing.
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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 image 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 images. Example builders include
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VirtualBox, VMware, and Amazon EC2. Builders can be created and added to
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Packer in the form of plugins.
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- `Commands` are sub-commands for the `packer` program that perform some 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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- `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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image. They perform the major work of making the image contain useful
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software. Example provisioners include shell scripts, Chef, Puppet, etc.
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- `Templates` are JSON files which define one or more builds by configuring
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the various components of Packer. Packer is able to read a template and use
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that information to create multiple machine images in parallel.
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