Terraform Learnings: Getting Started – LifeOfBrianOC

Playing with Terraform has been on my To-Do list for a while now (it’s a long list 🙂 ). Over the past couple of weeks i’ve been spending time in my homelab getting familiar with it and figured i’d create a blog series that may help others.

So where do you start? There are lots of resources on the web to get started. From blogs to Pluralsight courses. The Terraform documentation & provider documentation in the Terraform Registry is also very good and usually has what you need.

For my setup i use Visual Studio Code. I flip between my mac & a windows jump vm in my homelab, and VSC works seamlessly on both. I’ve installed the following VSC extension:

Installing Terraform is straightforward. Follow the steps for your OS to download and then install Terraform.

Terraform Basic Constructs

Terraform uses the following basic constructs (there are plenty more advanced constructs but baby steps!)

• Providers
  • Plugins to interact with target endpoints
• Variables
  • User input to create objects
  • There are multiple (6 i believe) ways to provide variables to Terraform
• Data Sources
  • Sources of information outside of Terraform that provide infrastructure details to interact with resources
• Resources
  • Infrastructure objects you interact with
• Configuration files
  • .tf file extension
  • Read alphabetically and actioned when you plan/apply/destroy your config (more on that later)
  • A single main.tf file can contain everything your infrastructure plan requires:
    • Provider
    • Variables
    • Data Sources
    • Resources
  • Recommended to split these out for larger environments
    • providers.tf
      • You must declare required_providers and then a provider block for each provider.
      • You can use alias = “alias_name” if you want to have multiple instances of a provider.
      • In the screenshot below the credentials are coming from variables defined in my terraform.tfvars file

• variables.tf
  • List of variables to be used in the configuration
  • Written in Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) (or JSON)

• Sensitive variables such as credentials or access keys should be stored in Terraform variable definition files .tfvars or stored as environment variables.
  • Use a Terraform.gitignore file to ensure your .tfvars with sensitive information are not committed to your git repo.

• Data Sources & Resources can be in a single file or split out into logical infrastructure files
  • network.tf
  • deploy_vm.tf
  • etc

Terraform Commands

Once you have your configuration defined you first want to validate that it will run

terraform plan -out=plan-name
# This will evaluate your configuration to ensure it is valid and store the result in a file called "plan-name"

terraform apply plan-name
# This will apply your configuration based on the output of the above plan. You will be asked to confirm this action. you can add -auto-approve to skip the confirmation (use with caution)

terraform destroy
# This will destroy the configuration. You will be asked to confirm this action. you can add -auto-approve to skip the confirmation (use with caution)

Hopefully this was helpful. This is just scratching the surface to get started with Terraform. I recommend getting hands on and reading the documentation as you go. I will continue this with a post on using the vSphere provider to deploy an OVA. Stay tuned!