Software Alternatives & Reviews

Packer VS LinuxKit

Compare Packer VS LinuxKit and see what are their differences

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.

LinuxKit logo LinuxKit

A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15
  • LinuxKit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-23

Packer videos

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LinuxKit videos

How LinuxKit Made Tinkerbell More Magical with Justin Cormack and Dan Finneran

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Packer and LinuxKit)
DevOps Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Developer Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Other Infrastructure Tools

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Packer and LinuxKit

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

LinuxKit Reviews

We have no reviews of LinuxKit yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Packer might be a bit more popular than LinuxKit. We know about 9 links to it since March 2021 and only 8 links to LinuxKit. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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LinuxKit mentions (8)

  • Gokrazy – Go Appliances
    Another project that aims to deliver this is Linuxkit (https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit). All the components they ship are written in memory safe languages (usually Go) and run as containers under containerd. You can build a custom image very easily, fully defined as a YAML file. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions
    Docker-the-company maintained https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    LF-Edge EVE project leverages Linuxkit to create custom OSs for Edge Devices which in turn leverages Containers as Lego Blocks. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Unpopular opinion: I was promised lightweight containers but I got yet another VM
    Behind the scenes Docker Desktop for Mac spawns a linuxkit VM with a bit of extra stuff like NFS to enable mounting Mac paths into containers. In the Docker Desktop settings you'll find the current resource assignment for that VM. That is pretty much reserved for docker so that it does not have to compete with MacOS processes for available resources. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What happened to the nice Ansible cloud (provisioning) listing?
    That said... You might want to check out linuxkit. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Packer and LinuxKit, you can also consider the following products

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Ottomatica slim - Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - ottomatica/slim

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Docker Swarm - Native clustering for Docker. Turn a pool of Docker hosts into a single, virtual host.

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

RancherOS - A simplified Linux distribution built from containers, for containers. Everything in RancherOS is managed by Docker, with minimum software needed to run Docker.