Packer

• Website: http://www.packer.io
• IRC: #packer-tool on Freenode
• Mailing list: Google Groups

Packer is a tool for building 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 comes out of the box with support for creating AMIs (EC2), VMware images, and VirtualBox images. Support for more platforms can be added via plugins.

Quick Start

First, get Packer by either downloading a pre-built Packer binary for your operating system or downloading and compiling Packer yourself.

After Packer is installed, create your first template, which tells Packer what platforms to build images for and how you want to build them. In our case, we'll create a simple AMI that has Redis pre-installed. Save this file as quick-start.json. Be sure to replace any credentials with your own.

{
  "builders": [{
    "type": "amazon-ebs",
    "access_key": "YOUR KEY HERE",
    "secret_key": "YOUR SECRET KEY HERE",
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "source_ami": "ami-de0d9eb7",
    "instance_type": "m1.small",
    "ssh_username": "ubuntu",
    "ami_name": "packer-quick-start {{.CreateTime}}"
  }]
}

Next, tell Packer to build the image:

$ packer build quick-start.json
...

Packer will build an AMI according to the "quick-start" template. The AMI will be available in your AWS account. To delete the AMI, you must manually delete it using the AWS console. Packer builds your images, it does not manage their lifecycle. Where they go, how they're run, etc. is up to you.

Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Packer website:

http://www.packer.io/docs

Developing Packer

If you wish to work on Packer itself, you'll first need Go installed (version 1.1+ is required). Next, clone this repository then just type make. In a few moments, you'll have a working packer executable:

$ make
...
$ bin/packer
...

You can run tests by typing make test. This will run tests for Packer core along with all the core builders and commands and such that come with Packer.