Software Alternatives & Reviews

Packer VS (R)?ex

Compare Packer VS (R)?ex 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.

(R)?ex logo (R)?ex

(R)?ex - manage all your boxes from a central point - Datacenter Automation and Configuration...
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15
  • (R)?ex Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-02

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Packer and (R)?ex)
DevOps Tools
91 91%
9% 9
SSH
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Tool
0 0%
100% 100

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 (R)?ex

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...

(R)?ex Reviews

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Packer should be more popular than (R)?ex. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. 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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(R)?ex mentions (2)

  • Ansible vs Fabric
    Have a look on Rex - https://rexify.org, in addition to dsl like constructs it is just pure perl. It also doesn't need any dependencies on the managed host, just perl and ssh. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Configuring netplan enabled hosts with Rex
    Since I feel that rex needs more attention, here is a small example from $work using rex. Needed to quickly reconfigure a number of Ubuntu hosts with netplan to use static ip addresses instead of DHCP. Source: about 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Packer and (R)?ex, you can also consider the following products

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

Python Fabric - Fabric is a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application...

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Ansible - Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

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

FAI - FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems