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Packer icon

Packer

Packer is a "source available" tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in...

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  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • BSD
  • Solaris
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GitHub repository

  •  14,680 Stars
  •  3,363 Forks
  •  401 Open Issues
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Our users have written 1 comments and reviews about Packer, and it has gotten 5 likes

Packer was added to AlternativeTo by jonleibowitz on and this page was last updated .

Comments and Reviews

   
Olav
0

No longer what you'd consider open source. Switched to BSL (business source license) / "source available" on the 11th of August 2023. Was previously MPL2 (Mozilla public license, version 2) / "open source".

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What is Packer?

Packer is a "source available" tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer does not replace configuration management like Chef or Puppet. In fact, when building images, Packer is able to use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.

A machine image is a single static unit that contains a pre-configured operating system and installed software which is used to quickly create new running machines. Machine image formats change for each platform. Some examples include AMIs for EC2, VMDK/VMX files for VMware, OVF exports for VirtualBox, etc.