Welcome back! By now, you should have a good understanding of what working with Terraform entails. Let’s dive into the second day of our Terraform journey!
Task 1: Understanding Basic Terraform Commands
Here are the basic Terraform commands you’ll frequently use, along with their purposes:
terraform init
- This command initializes a new or existing Terraform working directory. It downloads the necessary provider plugins and prepares the backend for managing state.
terraform init -upgrade
- This command initializes the directory like
terraform init
, but also upgrades the provider plugins to their latest compatible versions.
- This command initializes the directory like
terraform plan
- This command creates an execution plan, showing what actions Terraform will take to reach the desired state defined in your configuration files. It helps you review changes before applying them.
terraform apply
- This command executes the actions proposed in the Terraform plan, applying changes to your infrastructure. It creates, updates, or destroys resources as necessary.
terraform validate
- This command checks whether the configuration files are syntactically valid and internally consistent, ensuring that there are no errors before applying changes.
terraform fmt
- This command formats Terraform configuration files to a canonical format and style, ensuring consistency and improving readability.
terraform destroy
- This command destroys all resources defined in the Terraform configuration. It’s useful for cleaning up your environment when resources are no longer needed.
Competitors of Terraform
It’s also important to be aware of Terraform’s main competitors, which include:
Ansible: An open-source automation tool for IT tasks such as configuration management and application deployment.
Packer: A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Cloud Foundry: An open-source platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build and deploy applications.
Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers.