Installing and Getting Started

This lesson walks you through installing Terraform, understanding the directory structure, configuring your first provider, and running the core workflow: init, plan, apply, and destroy.

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Installing Terraform

macOS

brew tap hashicorp/tap
brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform

Linux (Ubuntu / Debian)

wget -O - https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /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

Windows

choco install terraform

Verify Installation

terraform version
# Terraform v1.x.x

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Project Structure

A typical Terraform project looks like this:

my-project/
├── main.tf          # Primary resource definitions
├── variables.tf     # Input variable declarations
├── outputs.tf       # Output value declarations
├── providers.tf     # Provider configuration
├── terraform.tfvars # Variable values (often gitignored)
├── .terraform/      # Downloaded providers and modules (gitignored)
├── .terraform.lock.hcl  # Dependency lock file (committed)
└── terraform.tfstate    # State file (gitignored if using remote backend)

Tip: While you can put everything in a single .tf file, splitting by concern (main.tf, variables.tf, outputs.tf) is a widely followed convention.

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Providers

A provider is a plugin that lets Terraform interact with a specific API. You must declare which providers you need:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.0"
    }
  }
  required_version = ">= 1.5"
}

provider "aws" {
  region = "eu-west-2"
}

Common Providers

Provider	Source	Purpose
AWS	hashicorp/aws	Amazon Web Services
Azure	hashicorp/azurerm	Microsoft Azure
GCP	hashicorp/google	Google Cloud Platform
Kubernetes	hashicorp/kubernetes	Kubernetes clusters
GitHub	integrations/github	GitHub repositories and teams
Cloudflare	cloudflare/cloudflare	DNS, CDN, WAF
Datadog	DataDog/datadog	Monitoring and alerting

The full provider registry is at registry.terraform.io.

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Your First Configuration

Create a file called main.tf:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    local = {
      source  = "hashicorp/local"
      version = "~> 2.0"
    }
  }
}

resource "local_file" "hello" {
  content  = "Hello, Terraform!"
  filename = "${path.module}/hello.txt"
}

This uses the local provider to create a file on disk — no cloud credentials needed.

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The Core Workflow

Step 1: Initialise

terraform init