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Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

Hey everyone. Packer guy here. I've been working on Packer the past couple months and I think its time to bring this to the public. I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

I want to stress that this is the _first public release_. There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of improvements to be made. It may not be "production ready" but it is definitely "experimentation ready." Although I know many companies already starting to use this in production.

I also want to note that although I made Vagrant as well, Packer is not tied to Vagrant in ANY WAY. Packer stands on its own as an extremely useful tool. However, Packer can be used to make Vagrant boxes, as well.

ENJOY!

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A tutorial showing every step from start to finish for creating something simple, such as a webserver running a database with some custom html pages would be really great.

The docs look good, but it's hard to see which steps to follow in what order for someone who hasn't tried to automate this kind of thing before.

The intro actually has a decent step-by-step getting started guide: http://www.packer.io/intro I welcome any feedback!

Goddamn, that is one beautiful theme.

Agreed. If you dont mind me asking mitchellh, who did the design?

When you're configuring the image, is the network stack usable? I currently use Boxgrinder, and the most frustrating limitation is that I can't start and interact with network daemons to initialize things that way, because it's really just a chroot jail (in the Linux sense). Consequently, I have to isolate the embedded databases of the services I'm configuring and install them directly as files.

Yes, everything is usable.

This looks great, nice work.

For the dev/prod parity use case, where do you usually draw the line between Packer and Vagrant? I'm currently building boxes with Veewee with all dependencies pre-installed and distributing this to the team. Vagrant could easily deal with this, installing dependencies when the VM is launched using provisioners.

Does anyone have any preferences/reasons to go one way or another?

It depends on what works best for you. In big organizations, I prefer to take the Veewee approach (although in this case replacing Veewee with Packer). If you use Veewee, see: http://www.packer.io/docs/templates/veewee-to-packer.html

On your high level descriptions of your tools, like packer, and vagrant, when you say "VMware" you really need to start being clear about which products you specifically support.

It is intentionally vague as I intend to support all of them. I apologize for the confusion, however.

Great stuff! I hope this means we'll see a bunch of identical prepackaged Vagrant boxes for all these platforms soon.

Yes, yes you will. The Vagrant boxes are now being built with Packer (but not uploaded yet).

How does packer compare to boxgrinder?

Sadly I would suggest not comparing it to boxgrinder. That project has stalled (I think they actually confirmed so in the mailing-list). Probably a better comparison would be against Oz/imagefactory (the proposed 'replacements' for boxgrinder).

Thx!

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