---
description: >
  Packer and the Packer documentation uses a vocabulary of terms that have specific meaning. Learn about Packer terminology in this glossary. 
page_title: Packer terminology
---

# Packer terminology

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.

- _Artifacts_ are the results of a single build, and are usually a set of IDs
  or files to represent a machine image. Every builder produces a single
  artifact. As an example, in the case of the Amazon EC2 builder, the
  artifact is a set of AMI IDs (one per region). For the VMware builder, the
  artifact is a directory of files comprising the created virtual machine.

- _Builds_ are a single task that eventually produces an artifact for a single
  platform. Multiple builds run in parallel. Example usage in a sentence:
  "The Packer build produced an AMI to run our web application." Or: "Packer
  is running the builds now for VMware, AWS, and VirtualBox."

- _Builders_ are components of Packer that are able to create a machine image
  for a single platform. Builders read in some configuration and use that to
  run and generate a machine image. A builder is invoked as part of a build
  in order to create the actual resulting artifacts. Example builders include
  VirtualBox, VMware, and Amazon EC2.

- _Commands_ are sub-commands for the `packer` program that perform a job.
  An example command is "build", which is invoked as `packer build`. Packer
  ships with a set of commands out of the box in order to define its
  command-line interface.

- _Data sources_ are components of Packer that fetch data from outside Packer
  and make it available to use within the template.
  Example of data sources include Amazon AMI, and Amazon Secrets Manager.

- _Post-processors_ are components of Packer that take the result of a
  builder or another post-processor and process that to create a new
  artifact. Examples of post-processors are compress to compress artifacts,
  upload to upload artifacts, etc.

- _Provisioners_ are components of Packer that install and configure software
  within a running machine prior to that machine being turned into a static
  artifact. They perform the major work of making the artifact contain useful
  software. Example provisioners include shell scripts, Chef, Puppet, etc.

- _Templates_ are either [HCL](https://packer.io/templates/hcl_templates) or JSON files that define one or more builds by configuring the various components of Packer. Packer reads a template and uses the information to create multiple machine images in parallel.
