HashiCorp Packer AI Skill Guide (Claude)

Overview & Engine Architecture

Packer turns a declarative template into a golden image: a builder launches a temporary VM/container, provisioners install/configure software, then the result is snapshotted (AMI, Azure image, GCE image, etc.). Packer does not manage fleet drift after publish—consumers (@terraform-aws, @pulumi) launch from the artifact. Agents prefer HCL2, run packer init → validate → build, pin base images, emit manifests, clean temp resources on failure, and never bake long-lived cloud keys into images.