Best Practices and Collaboration

As Terraform projects grow, adopting best practices for code organisation, collaboration, security, and CI/CD becomes essential. This lesson consolidates recommendations for running Terraform in production teams.

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Code Organisation

File Naming Conventions

File	Purpose
main.tf	Primary resource definitions
variables.tf	Input variable declarations
outputs.tf	Output value declarations
providers.tf	Provider configuration and requirements
backend.tf	Backend configuration
locals.tf	Local value definitions
data.tf	Data source definitions
versions.tf	Version constraints (sometimes combined with providers.tf)

Repository Structure

infrastructure/
├── modules/                    # Reusable modules
│   ├── network/
│   ├── compute/
│   ├── database/
│   └── monitoring/
├── environments/               # Environment configurations
│   ├── development/
│   ├── staging/
│   └── production/
├── .gitignore                  # Ignore state files, .terraform/
├── .terraform.lock.hcl         # Committed — pins provider versions
└── README.md

.gitignore

# Terraform
.terraform/
*.tfstate
*.tfstate.backup
*.tfvars          # May contain secrets
crash.log
override.tf
override.tf.json
*_override.tf
*_override.tf.json

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Version Pinning

Provider Versions

Always pin provider versions to avoid unexpected changes: