A provider for HashiCorp Packer that has Packer embedded in it so that you can run it on any environment (including Terraform Cloud).
You can find documentation in the Terraform Registry.
The main resource of this provider is packer_image which builds the image using packer.
Examples can be found in the examples subdirectory.
Packer does not manage your images – which means that neither does this provider. This provider will not detect whether the image exists on the remote because that's not something that Packer can do.
Terraform providers are only a means of plugging an API or an external system into Terraform which is what this provider is doing. Regardless, we still reserve the possibility that we may add support for managing images independently of Packer itself.
You have multiple options for managing your images:
You can use the force attribute of resource packer_image to overwrite the image every time.
The remote state does not affect this provider's ability to function. If you delete an image remotely, Packer will still run and attempt to create a new one which should succeed. There is no fundamental difference between "Creation" and "Update" of a packer_image resource.