Packer VS terraform

Compare Packer vs terraform and see what are their differences.

Packer

Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. (by hashicorp)

terraform

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. (by hashicorp)
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Packer terraform
65 497
14,850 40,914
0.6% 1.8%
9.4 9.9
1 day ago 7 days ago
Go Go
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Packer

Posts with mentions or reviews of Packer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-20.
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck
  • Avoiding DevOps tool hell
    9 projects | dev.to | 24 Jul 2023
    Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.
  • DevOps Tooling Landscape
    12 projects | dev.to | 4 Apr 2023
    HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.
  • auto-provisioning multiple raspberry pi's
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 19 Mar 2023
    Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).
  • How do hosting companies immediately create vm right after purchasing one?
    2 projects | /r/linux | 5 Mar 2023
  • Virtualbox 7.0.4 kickstart issue
    5 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2022
    However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.
    5 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2022
    I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.
  • Is "development environment as code" a thing?
    5 projects | /r/DevelEire | 28 Nov 2022
    Packer. https://github.com/hashicorp/packer
  • Dinamic Infrastructure
    2 projects | /r/devops | 27 Nov 2022
    For an AMI build pipeline, have a look at Hashicorp Packer and Ansible if a host is long lived
  • A practical approach to structuring Golang applications
    10 projects | dev.to | 3 Oct 2022

terraform

Posts with mentions or reviews of terraform. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-18.
  • I Deployed My Own Cute Lil’ Private Internet (a.k.a. VPC)
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
    Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).
  • Configurar AWS Signer en lambda con terraform
    2 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
  • Cranelift code generation comes to Rust
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • The Essential Guide to Internal Developer Platforms
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Mar 2024
    For example, integrating Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) into the IDP can streamline updates and rollbacks.
  • Experience Continuous Integration with Jenkins | Ansible | Artifactory | SonarQube | PHP
    8 projects | dev.to | 24 Feb 2024
    In this project, you will understand and get hands on experience around the entire concept around CI/CD from applications perspective. To fully gain real expertise around this idea, it is best to see it in action across different programming languages and from the platform perspective too. From the application perspective, we will be focusing on PHP here; there are more projects ahead that are based on Java, Node.js, .Net and Python. By the time you start working on Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes projects, you will get to see the platform perspective of CI/CD in action.
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.
  • 🦊 GitLab CI: Deploy a Majestic Single Server Runner on AWS
    4 projects | dev.to | 17 Feb 2024
    To quickly deploy the architecture, we will be using Terraform. With Terraform, we can automate the deployment process and have our infrastructure up and running in minutes.
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    47 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
    terraform.io — Terraform Cloud. Free remote state management and team collaboration for up to 500 resources.
  • Root Cause Chronicles: Quivering Queue
    5 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2024
    Robin was neck-deep trying to finish writing a new Terraform module and replied without looking up, “What’s gone wrong?”.
  • Authorization and Amazon Verified Permissions - A New Way to Manage Permissions Part XII: Terraform
    5 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2024
    Welcome back to my blog post series dedicated to building authorization using Cedar and Amazon Verified Permissions. In a previous blogpost we've learned about batch authorization. Today, we will take a look at how to build AVP with one of the most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool - Terraform.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Packer and terraform you can also consider the following projects:

terragrunt - Terragrunt is a thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple Terraform modules.

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

terraform-provider-restapi - A terraform provider to manage objects in a RESTful API

crossplane - The Cloud Native Control Plane

boto3 - AWS SDK for Python

nvim-lspconfig - Quickstart configs for Nvim LSP

sceptre - Build better AWS infrastructure

cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue

helmfile - Deploy Kubernetes Helm Charts

Vagrant - Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

cloud-custodian - Rules engine for cloud security, cost optimization, and governance, DSL in yaml for policies to query, filter, and take actions on resources

example-bazel-monorepo - 🌿💚 Example Bazel-ified monorepo, supporting Golang, Java, Python, Scala, and Typescript