The Packer Book

0.1 Who is this book for?

This book is a hands-on introduction to Packer, the HashiCorp image builder. The book is for engineers, developers, sysadmins, operations staff, and those with an interest in infrastructure, configuration management, or DevOps. It assumes no prior knowledge of Packer. If you’re a Packer guru, you might find some of this book too introductory.

There is an expectation that the reader has basic Unix/Linux skills and is familiar with Git version control, the command line, editing files, installing packages, managing services, and basic networking.

Finally, Packer is evolving quickly and has only just reached a 1.0.0 release state. That means “here be dragons,” and you should take care when using Packer ...