---
title: "Managing Artifact Versions"
---

# Managing Artifact Versions

Artifacts stored in Atlas are versioned and assigned a version number.
Versions are useful to roll back, audit and deploy images specific versions
of images to certain environments in a targeted way.

This assumes you are familiar with the [Atlas artifact provider](https://terraform.io/docs/providers/atlas/index.html)
in Terraform.

### Finding the Version of an Artifact

Artifact versions can be found with the [`terraform show` command](https://terraform.io/docs/commands/show.html),
or by looking at the Packer logs generated during builds. After a
successful artifact upload, version numbers are displayed. "latest" can
be used to use the latest version of the artifact.

The following output is from `terraform show`.

    atlas_artifact.web-worker:
      id = us-east-1:ami-3a0a1d52
      build = latest
      metadata_full.# = 1
      metadata_full.region-us-east-1 = ami-3a0a1d52
      name = %{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/web-worker
      slug = %{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/web-worker/amazon.image/7
      type = amazon.image

In this case, the version is 7 and can be found in the persisted slug
attribute.

### Pinning Artifacts to Specific Versions

You can pin artifacts to a specific version. This allows for a targeted
deploy.

    resource "atlas_artifact" "web-worker" {
      name = "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/web-worker"
      type = "amazon.image"
      version = 7
    }

This will use version 7 of the `web-worker` artifact.

### Pinning Artifacts to Specific Builds

Artifacts can also be pinned to an Atlas build number. This is only
possible if Atlas was used to build the artifact with Packer.

    resource "atlas_artifact" "web-worker" {
      name = "%{DEFAULT_USERNAME}/web-worker"
      type = "amazon.image"
      build = 5
    }

It's recommended to use versions, instead of builds, as it will
be easier to track within Atlas and when building outside of the Atlas
environment.