terraform/website/source/docs/enterprise/packer/artifacts/creating-amis.html.md

---
layout: "packer"
page_title: "Creating AMI Artifacts"
sidebar_current: "docs-enterprise-packer-artifacts-amis"
description: |-
  Creating AMI artifacts with Terraform Enterprise.
---

# Creating AMI Artifacts with Terraform Enterprise

In an immutable infrastructure workflow, it's important to version and store full images (artifacts)
to be deployed. This section covers storing [AWS AMI](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AMIs.html)
images in Terraform Enterprise to be queried and used later.

Note the actual AMI does _not get stored_. Terraform Enterprise
simply keeps the AMI ID as a reference to the target image. Tools
like Terraform can then use this in a deploy.

### Steps

If you run Packer in Terraform Enterprise, the following will happen after a [push](/docs/enterprise/packer/builds/starting.html):

1. Terraform Enterprise will run `packer build` against your template in our infrastructure.
This spins up an AWS instance in your account and provisions it with
 any specified provisioners
2. Packer stops the instance and stores the result as an AMI in AWS
under your account. This then returns an ID (the artifact) that it passes to the post-processor
3. The post-processor creates and uploads the new artifact version with the
ID in Terraform Enterprise of the type `amazon.image` for use later

### Example

Below is a complete example Packer template that starts an AWS instance.

    {
      "push": {
        "name": "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/frontend"
      },
      "provisioners": [],
      "builders": [
        {
          "type": "amazon-ebs",
          "access_key": "",
          "secret_key": "",
          "region": "us-east-1",
          "source_ami": "ami-2ccc7a44",
          "instance_type": "c3.large",
          "ssh_username": "ubuntu",
          "ami_name": "TFE Example {{ timestamp }}"
        }
      ],
      "post-processors": [
        {
          "type": "atlas",
          "artifact": "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/web-server",
          "artifact_type": "amazon.image"
        }
      ]
    }