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

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
packer	Creating AMI Artifacts	docs-enterprise-packer-artifacts-amis	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 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:

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"
    }
  ]
}