github.com/hashicorp/packer@v1.14.3/website/content/docs/terminology.mdx (about)

     1  ---
     2  description: >
     3    Packer and the Packer documentation uses a vocabulary of terms that have specific meaning. Learn about Packer terminology in this glossary. 
     4  page_title: Packer terminology
     5  ---
     6  
     7  # Packer terminology
     8  
     9  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.
    10  
    11  - _Artifacts_ are the results of a single build, and are usually a set of IDs
    12    or files to represent a machine image. Every builder produces a single
    13    artifact. As an example, in the case of the Amazon EC2 builder, the
    14    artifact is a set of AMI IDs (one per region). For the VMware builder, the
    15    artifact is a directory of files comprising the created virtual machine.
    16  
    17  - _Builds_ are a single task that eventually produces an artifact for a single
    18    platform. Multiple builds run in parallel. Example usage in a sentence:
    19    "The Packer build produced an AMI to run our web application." Or: "Packer
    20    is running the builds now for VMware, AWS, and VirtualBox."
    21  
    22  - _Builders_ are components of Packer that are able to create a machine image
    23    for a single platform. Builders read in some configuration and use that to
    24    run and generate a machine image. A builder is invoked as part of a build
    25    in order to create the actual resulting artifacts. Example builders include
    26    VirtualBox, VMware, and Amazon EC2.
    27  
    28  - _Commands_ are sub-commands for the `packer` program that perform a job.
    29    An example command is "build", which is invoked as `packer build`. Packer
    30    ships with a set of commands out of the box in order to define its
    31    command-line interface.
    32  
    33  - _Data sources_ are components of Packer that fetch data from outside Packer
    34    and make it available to use within the template.
    35    Example of data sources include Amazon AMI, and Amazon Secrets Manager.
    36  
    37  - _Post-processors_ are components of Packer that take the result of a
    38    builder or another post-processor and process that to create a new
    39    artifact. Examples of post-processors are compress to compress artifacts,
    40    upload to upload artifacts, etc.
    41  
    42  - _Provisioners_ are components of Packer that install and configure software
    43    within a running machine prior to that machine being turned into a static
    44    artifact. They perform the major work of making the artifact contain useful
    45    software. Example provisioners include shell scripts, Chef, Puppet, etc.
    46  
    47  - _Templates_ are files that define one or more builds by configuring various Packer components. Packer reads a template and uses the information to create multiple machine images in parallel. You can write templates in HCL or JSON files format.