Packer Concepts

External

• https://www.packer.io/docs/

Internal

• Packer

Builder

A builder is responsible for creating machines and generating images from them for various platforms. There are separate builders for EC2, VMware, VirtualBox, etc. An example of AWS builder is "amazon-ebs".

Provisioner

A provisioner is a builtin method or an executor of some third party software (shell script, ansible-local, file) that installs and configures the machine image after the image has booted. A provisioner prepares the system for use by:

• patching the kernel
• installing patches
• creating users