Download terraform

with a previously-saved plan file will now verify that the provider plugin packages used to create the plan fully match the ones used during apply, using the same checksum scheme that Terraform normally uses for the dependency lock file. Previously Terraform was checking consistency of plugins from a plan file using a legacy mechanism which covered only the main plugin executable, not any other files that might be distributed alongside in the plugin package.

This additional check should not affect typical plugins that conform to the expectation that a plugin package's contents are immutable once released, but may affect a hypothetical in-house plugin that intentionally modifies extra files in its package directory somehow between plan and apply. If you have such a plugin, you'll need to change its approach to store those files in some other location separate from the package directory. This is a minor compatibility break motivated by increasing the assurance that plugins have not been inadvertently or maliciously modified between plan and apply.

In the infrastructure as code (IaC) space, one of the most useful tools to come out in the last several years is HashiCorp’s Terraform Windows. The ability to version infrastructure, automate the provisioning of resources, and execute across different cloud vendors is huge for any DevOps and automation workflows.

One use-case for Terraform is in CI/CD. Terraform allows you to:

• create a testing environment
• deploy an application
• run integration tests
• destroy the testing environment

All of the steps are performed automatically too. And no data center is required!

Prerequisites

This article is a walkthrough on getting Terraform Windows up and running. If you’d like to follow along, please be sure you have the following prerequisites in place.

• A Windows 10 device
• An AWS Account
• The AWS CLI installed and configured on that device. You can learn how to install it here and how to configure it here.
• (Optional) Visual Studio Code with the Terraform extension

Installing the Terraform Windows Application

To leverage the power of Terraform, you must first get it installed on your operating system of choice. In this article, I’m going to be focusing on Windows. But know that Terraform can run on other operating systems. If you’re not on Windows, take a look at the installation documentation.

The Hard Way

If you can’t use a package manager or you want to understand how the installation process works, you can install Terraform manually. You can install Terraform by downloading the binary and adding it to the system path environment variable. If this looks intimidating, I assure you there’s an easier way to do it you’ll learn in the next section.

1. Download the appropriate version of Terraform from HashiCorp’s download page. In my case, it’s the Windows 64-bit version.
2. Make a folder on your C:\ drive where you can put the Terraform executable. I prefer to place installers in a subfolder (e.g. C:\tools) where you can put binaries.
3. After the the download finishes, go find it in File Explorer. Extract the zip file to the folder you created in step 2.
4. Open your Start Menu and type in “environment” and the first thing that comes up should be Edit the System Environment Variables option. Click on that and you should see this window.

5.   Click on Environment Variables… at the bottom and you’ll see this:

6.   Under the bottom section where it says System Variables, find one called Path and click edit. You’ll then see a list of where to find the binaries that Windows might need for any given reason.

7.   Click New and add the folder path where terraform.exe is located to the bottom of the list. It should look like this when you finish.

8.   Click OK on each of the menus you’ve opened up until there’s no more left.

9.   To make sure that Windows detects the new path, open a new CMD/PowerShell prompt and enter .

10.   Verify the installation was successful by entering . If it returns a version, you’re good to go.

The Easy Way

Phew, that was a lot of work! That would be awful to do every time you had to install new software on your device. Let’s use a package manager instead. There are a few out package managers you can use to install Terraform on Windows. For Windows, my favorite is Chocolatey. It makes installing, removing and updating software as simple as a one-line command, and Terraform is no exception to that.

To install Terraform with Chocolatey, do the following steps:

1. Open a CMD/PowerShell prompt as an administrator and install Chocolatey using the command from their install page.
2. Once that is complete, run . If you like, you can also put on the end to auto-agree to installing it on your device.

After that command runs, you will get something like this:

3.   Verify the installation was successful by entering .

The Linux Way

I can almost hear what you’re thinking. Wait a minute Chris, didn’t you say this was going to cover installing Terraform on Windows?

Yes, and it still is. But one of the features on Windows 10 is the Windows for Linux Subsystem, or WSL. This allows you to run Linux commands on Windows.

1. Install WSL. I’m not going to go in depth on how to install and set up WSL here, but if you want to follow along and don’t have it set up already. A TechSnips snip I did on this topic can be found below.

2.   In your WSL shell, run You’ll need this to extract the Terraform binaries later.

3.   Download Terraform by running . Remember to replace the version and architecture with the one that best fits your device. You can find the full list of Terraform Releases here.

4.   Run to unzip the contents of the zip into a folder called terraform.

5.   Once the ZIP file is uncompressed, you’ll need to move it somewhere accessible by the system path. Fortunately, Linux has a folder that users can add binaries to by default. Move the Terraform binary there by running . The /usr/local/bin folder is already set in your system path.

6.   Verify the installation was successful by running .

Automating an AWS Terraform EC2 Instance

Now that you have installed Terraform, you can begin using it. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate building with a simple AWS Terraform EC2 instance. But know Terraform can provision hundreds of different types of infrastructure.

To get started, you’ll first need a directory to run the Terraform EC2 scripts from. It’s important to have a separate directory for each environment. At the time I’m writing this, Terraform doesn’t have a way to filter what it runs. It will run every script in your current working directory.

Setting Up a TF Script

1. In your cmd or PowerShell console ran as administrator, run then
2. Once you have a directory, you’ll need a Terraform script. Below is an example of one you can use. This is a typical Terraform script using the AWS provider to create an AWS instance resource.

If you’d like the entire script, copy it below. If you want to understand what this script is doing, read on below.

3.   Save the script above as in your working directory.

Understanding TF Scripts

Before you go any further, look at the block below and what it’s declaring.

This block tells Terraform EC2 what provider to use. There are providers for all the major cloud vendors, as well as some on-prem vendors. If you’re more advanced and you know how to write Golang, you can also write your own provider.

This block tells Terraform to use the AWS provider and access keys in the file under the profile name . This file gets created when you setup the AWS CLI with command as stated in the prerequisites.

It’s also worth noting that is shorthand for the current user’s directory. If you’re coming from a Windows background, this is equal to as or . But Terraform does not support that notation at the time of writing.

The next block below describes a Terraform EC2 Instance, and what to build it with. If you take a look at the Terraform documentation for aws_instance, you can see some parameters are required; some are optional. In this case, the required parameters are the AMI ID () for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and for the instance type.

By passing a tag block with the key and the value , this tag will also get assigned to the instance that gets created. This is optional.

Building the AWS Terraform EC2 Instance: Testing

Now that the script is set up, call it by running from your working directory. This will pull down all the dependencies and provider into a folder named . If all goes well, you should get something like this:

Before you make any changes, Terraform EC2 allows you to see what will be created by running . Here is what that will output:

Building the AWS EC2 Instance: Creating

Now you’re ready to run it for yourself by running . Below you will see output like , but with an added prompt to confirm that you actually want to apply these changes.

Once you type ‘yes’, Terraform EC2 will start provisioning the Terraform EC2 instance by calling the AWS APIs with the access key in your credentials file. This may take some time. Once finished, you’ll see something like below:

Destroying the AWS EC2 Instance

Once you’re done with the test environment, you can destroy the instance.

In your cmd/PowerShell console, type . Like the command, you’ll see a list of resources Terraform is going to destroy then a prompt before actually destroying them.

Once you type yes, Terraform EC2 will start destroying the instance and confirm when it’s finished.

Summary

Now you know the many different ways to install and run Terraform on Windows. In this post, I covered a single-use case of configuring an AWS Terraform EC2 instance. Through that demonstration, you learned how to understand and interpret a Terraform file and what output Terraform returns when running. You then created and destroyed the instance, all from your cmd/PowerShell console.

By now, you should have a better understanding of how Terraform works, and how to get started with it in your own environment. Happy Terraforming!

More from Adam The Automator & Friends

To use Terraform you will need to install it. HashiCorp distributes Terraform as a binary package. You can also install Terraform using popular package managers.

»Install Terraform

»Verify the installation

Verify that the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and listing Terraform's available subcommands.

Add any subcommand to to learn more about what it does and available options.

»Troubleshoot

If you get an error that could not be found, your environment variable was not set up properly. Please go back and ensure that your variable contains the directory where Terraform was installed.

»Enable tab completion

If you use either Bash or Zsh, you can enable tab completion for Terraform commands. To enable autocomplete, first ensure that a config file exists for your chosen shell.

Then install the autocomplete package.

Once the autocomplete support is installed, you will need to restart your shell.

»Quick start tutorial

Now that you've installed Terraform, you can provision an NGINX server in less than a minute using Docker on Mac, Windows, or Linux. You can also follow the rest of this tutorial in your web browser.

Click on the tab(s) below relevant to your operating system.

Create a directory named .

Then, navigate into it.

Paste the following Terraform configuration into a file and name it .

Initialize the project, which downloads a plugin that allows Terraform to interact with Docker.

Provision the NGINX server container with . When Terraform asks you to confirm type and press .

Verify the existence of the NGINX container by visiting localhost:8000 in your web browser or running to see the container.

To stop the container, run .

You've now provisioned and destroyed an NGINX webserver with Terraform.

»Next Steps

Next, you will create real infrastructure in the cloud of your choice.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It enables the users to define and provision a data center infrastructure of different cloud providers using a high-level configuration language known as Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON but first, we need to install Terraform. It is supported by many operating systems.

This blog post covers the basic installation of terraform on different Operating Systems and a very powerful text editor given below:

Install Terraform on Windows ^

There are a couple of steps you need to perform to install this on your Windows machine:

1. Download the terraform Executable File (.exe) by visiting here and select 32-bit or 64-bit according to your machine.
   
2. Extract the downloaded .zip folder containing the terraform executable file and copy the file.
3. Create a new Terraform directory and paste the file, this directory can be anywhere on your machine. I would recommend pasting in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Terraform”.
4. Copy the path of the executable file, in my case it is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Terraform”.
5. Now, we need to set an environment variable that points to this path. Search environment in the windows search bar and select “Edit the system environment variables“.
   
6. Click on “Environment Variables…“, select “Path” in the pop-up and click on “Edit“.
   
7. Paste the copied path by clicking on New and then click OK
   
8. Done!! Now to check if it is installed open command prompt and type terraform -v and you will get the current version as the output.
   

This completes the terraform installation on Windows.

Also check: Types of Terraform Variables

Install Terraform on macOS ^

To install terraform Mac OS we will first install Homebrew using the below command:

Once Homebrew is installed, install terraform using the below command:

To confirm the installation, type terraform -v and you will get the current version as the output.

Check Out: Our blog post on Terraform.

Install Terraform on Linux ^

1. Download the terraform Zip File by visiting here and select 32-bit or 64-bit according to your machine.
2. Unzip the folder using the command (make sure you are in the correct directory): $ unzip terraform_0.12.26_linux_amd64.zip (file name may change according to the newer versions).
3. Move the extracted terraform file to /usr/local/bin/ using the command: $ sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin / 
4. Confirm the file has been moved and terraform has been installed using the command: $ terraform -v (if it gives the current version as output then the installation is successful).

Check Out: Our blog post on Terraform Cheat Sheet.

Installing Terraform Extension on Visual Studio Code ^

This is an Optional step in Installing Terraform. There are many text editors in the market, we are going to choose Visual Studio Code for this as it is a very powerful text editor and supports all the platforms.

To download the Visual Studio Code, click here.

Once you have downloaded the visual studio code, open it and go to extension and search for terraform and Install it.

Check Out: Our blog post on Terraform Create VM.

After it has been installed, to verify the installation open Terminal and type:

Related/References

Join FREE Masterclass

To know about Terraform and what to study Including Hands-On labs you must perform to clear Terraform Certified Associate certification exam by registering for our FREE Masterclass.

Click on the below image to Register Our FREE Masterclass Now!

terraform is infrastructure as code tool. With terraform scripts we can automate the configuration of our infrastructure. in this tutorial i will show you how to install terraform on windows 10 or 8 or 7. to install terraform on windows 10 or 8 or 7 follow below steps.

• download terraform zip package from the official terraform website
• unzip the terrafrom package
• configure environment variable for terrafrom

Download Terraform

download the terraform from official terraform website   https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html

you can see the windows 32 bit and 64 bit source files. download depends on your system here i am downloading 64 bit terraform. it will be downloaded as zip file.

Unzip the terraform package

extract the downloaded zip file. Here i downloaded the terraform zip file in C:\Users\devops\Downloads\. I extrated the zip file, after extracting the zip file you can see terraform.exe file in C:\Users\devops\Downloads\terraform_0.12.23_windows_amd64

This is the workspace path of your tarraform in your system or you can say the path of terraform.exe.

Configure environment variables for terraform

This PC(MyComputer)—>properties —>advanced system settings–>environment variables—>system variables—>path–edit–>new

in your windows 10 or 8 or 7 right click on This PC(MyComputer)—>properties —>advanced system settings. Here you can see environment variables click on it here you can see user variables and system variables. In system variables you can see “path” select path and click on edit and add path of terraform i.e  C:\Users\devops\Downloads\terraform_0.12.23_windows_amd64

That’s it we have successfully configured terraform on windows 10 or 8 or 7.

Verify terraform version

using terraform version command you can see the terraform version. open command prompt in your system and enter terraform version command. it will give you the terraform version.

List Terraform Commands

To list the terraform commands open command prompt and enter terraform and hit enter. it will list all terraform commands.

Create Ec2 Instance using terraform

lets check this article on How to create ec2 instance using terraform

• how to install terraform on windows 10 or 7
• install terraform on windows 10 or 7
• terraform installation on windows 10 or 7
• installation of terraform on windows 7 or 10