To get the most out of this book

It will help to have a basic understanding of the HashiCorp Configuration Language, known as HCL2. JSON is also offered as an alternate option to some HCL2 Packer uses. Packer and most HashiCorp projects are written in Golang, also known as Go, but this will only be necessary if encountering a bug in Packer or extending Packer by writing a plugin.

The Packer binary is built for most common platforms and architectures, including Linux and Windows, and the most common architectures, such as x86_64 and ARM/AArch64. Since Packer is statically linked, it relies on no external libraries and the underlying operating system shouldn’t affect the user experience unless using external plugins that aren’t built for your target platform.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
HCL2	Platform agnostic
JSON	Platform agnostic
Golang	Platform agnostic

If running Packer in production, make sure to install only official releases signed with the HashiCorp engineering signing keys. The code for this book requires at least Packer version 1.7. Future releases may change behavior, so please verify the newest Packer release that works for you. For development or following along with this book, you may build Packer from the source or use a binary directly from the HashiCorp releases page: https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Every sample of code for this book can be considered platform agnostic. It can be run on Windows or Linux, or even Raspberry Pi. Adjust the code as necessary to suit your platform. Packer is designed to run on just about anything and remote builds in the cloud will not require large amounts of resources locally. Local builds or virtual machines may require local storage and RAM.