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Terraform for developers

goal of this story is to get an idea what is terraform and how an backend software engineer can use it.

I will just focus on basic functionalities which is essential for developers.

What is Terraform

you can get all the information about terraform here however in summery it is a tool written in golang by hashicorp, devops use this because it is very easy to maintain and its user friendly.

Getting Started

You can download terraform from there official website.

If you are an windows user, please add exe file in system32 folder or just add you exe path in environment.

after installing just write terraform -v in terminal/PowerShell.

Basic Commands

as a developer you should only worry about 4 commands

  1. terraform init

    this command will prepare your working directory for other commands.

  2. terraform plan

    Show changes required by the current configuration, this is the most crucial step, the output of this step will give you all the things terraform will do, so before applying just make sure you are not destroying anything.

  3. terraform apply

    Create or update infrastructure, this will trigger the cloud resources and create all the infra for you.

  4. terraform import

    Associate existing infrastructure with a Terraform resource, that means if you have existing resource in cloud it will just import there configuration in you local state.

I hope this article helps you understand something, if you have any question or you wants more stuff please add comments, I will try to add them.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.