Note: Managing your insfrastructure setup with manual process will take long time. But Terraform let’s you manage

What is Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as Code tool developed by HashiCorp. It is used by DevOps teams to automate infrastructure tasks.

It is an infrastructure provisioning tool where you can store your cloud infrastructure setup as codes.

Install Terraform

Ubuntu/Debian

wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install terraform

Once we completed the installation steps above, we can verify the terraform installation by checking the terraform version.

You can refer to the official Terraform Download page for detailed instructions for installing Terraform.

How Terraform works:

The state (configuration) of the Infrastructure is written as code in the user machine and then the terraform API interacts with the providers (AWS) to create and manage the cloud platform.

Terraform Workflow

Write

Define the infrastructure resource (services and configurations) as code in HCL(Hashicorp Configuration Language)

Plan

Review the plan, as to what changes terraform will make to your infrastructure based on your declaration once you apply.

Apply

Once the plan is reviewed, we can apply the changes to the provider. As Terraform provisions our infrastructure and updates the state file.

Terraform configuration file structure

Terraform configuration files will have the extension of .tf.

main.tf

Here we declare the provider and resources to be deployed along with the type of resource and all resources specific settings

variables.tf

Here we declare all the input variables used in the main.tf file to provision the resources.

outputs.tf

It contains outputs from the resources created in main.tf

terraform.tfvars

It contains the variables that are used in the root modules only

terraform.tfstate

A state file is created once after Terraform is run. It stores the state about our managed infrastructure.

Terraform commands

terraform init

Initiates a working terraform directory containing terraform configuration files.

terraform plan

The terraform plan command creates an execution plan, which lets you preview the changes that Terraform plans to make to your infrastructure.

terraform apply

The terraform apply command executes the actions proposed in a Terraform plan, and applies the configuration to the infrastructure.

terraform destroys

The terraform destroy command is a convenient way to destroy all remote objects managed by a particular Terraform configuration.

Getting started with Terraform