| --- |
| page_title: Introduction |
| description: |- |
| Welcome to the world of Packer! This introduction guide will show you what |
| Packer is, explain why it exists, the benefits it has to offer, and how you |
| can get started with it. If you're already familiar with Packer, the |
| documentation provides more of a reference for all available features. |
| --- |
| |
| # Introduction to Packer |
| |
| Welcome to the world of Packer! This introduction guide will show you what |
| Packer is, explain why it exists, the benefits it has to offer, and how you can |
| get started with it. If you're already familiar with Packer, the |
| [documentation](/packer/docs) provides more of a reference for all available |
| features. |
| |
| ## What is Packer? |
| |
| Packer is an open source 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Machine_Image) for EC2, |
| VMDK/VMX files for VMware, OVF exports for VirtualBox, etc. |
