---
page_title: Introduction to Packer
description: Packer is a community tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Learn about Packer benefits and how to get started.
---

# Introduction to Packer

This introduction describes Packer benefits and how you can get started with it. 

## What is Packer?

Packer is a community 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 and VMX files for VMware, and OVF exports for VirtualBox.

## HCP Packer

For information about using HCP Packer to store metadata about build artifacts, refer to the
[HCP Packer documentation](/hcp/docs/packer) or [sign into HCP](https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/sign-in) to explore HCP Packer features.