In recent years, IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tools have become essential to us when provisioning and managing our IT infrastructure components. The secret behind these tools is they automate the previously-mentioned manual process through a simple code. This is very beneficial when we have to handle many infrastructure components.

One of the popular IaC tools is Terraform by HashiCorp, and it is much easier to provision and manage the IT infrastructure components using this tool. In this article, we will discuss how to create and initialize a Terraform folder after writing some Terraform configurations using HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language).

Let’s get started!

Terraform Folder

Imagine that we are building a web application. Before doing any task, the first thing we do is create a folder. This folder will contain all our web application’s source files and folders. Generally, this folder is known as the working directory. Similarly, in Terraform, we should also create a folder, and that folder is called the Terraform folder.

The following are the contents that we typically see inside an initialized Terraform folder:

Terraform configuration file: This includes the code that we write to describe the resources that Terraform should provision or/and manage.

.terraform directory: Terraform uses this folder to:

• Control the cached modules and provider plugins
• Record the currently active workspace and the last known backend configuration

This folder is created after the initialization.

State data: Terraform stores these data in a “terraform.tfstate” file (if the directory only uses the default workspace) or a “terraform.tfstate.d” directory (if the directory uses multiple workspaces).

Next, we will see how to initialize a Terraform folder.

Initializing a Terraform Folder

When we provision and manage the infrastructure components with Terraform, we have to ensure that our working directory or Terraform folder is ready to provision and manage those IT resources in our infrastructure. Within the Terraform folder, there should be dependencies and plugins that are necessary to perform the general operations in Terraform.

So, how can we make sure that our working directory is ready?

To ensure, we should initialize the Terraform folder/working directory. Terraform provides us with a command called “terraform init” which does the following tasks to prepare the working directory:

• Initializing the backend
• Downloading and installing the provider plugins
• Accessing the state
• Downloading the modules

Let’s walk through the steps to successfully initialize a Terraform folder.

Steps to Initialize a Terraform Folder

Mainly, there are four steps that we can follow from scratch.

Download and Install Terraform

If our system does not have Terraform installed, we must download it from their official website and install it according to their installation guide.

We can skip installing Terraform if we already have it on our system.

Create the Terraform Folder

As the second step, we need to set up our Terraform folder which is also known as the working directory.

Create a Terraform Configuration File

As the third step, we should create a Terraform configuration file. Typically, we name this file as “main.tf”. Inside it, we write our configuration as a code using HCL. This code describes how we want Terraform to manage our infrastructure components.

Initialize the Terraform Folder/Working Directory

When we finish writing the Terraform configuration file, we can initialize the Terraform folder using the earlier command: “terraform init”.

Let’s take an example to understand the previous four steps clearly.

Let’s say we want to create a local file called “Sam.txt” in the “Desktop” folder. To do that, we write our Terraform configuration file “main.tf” inside the folder called “myPet”. Inside the “Sam.txt” file, we add some text which is “My pet’s name is Sam, and I love my pet”. In this scenario, “myPet” will be our Terraform folder and we use Terraform to provision the “Sam.txt” file.

As the first step, we have to download and install Terraform. Let’s assume that we already installed it on our system.

So, the next step is to create the Terraform folder which is “myPet”. Assuming we are on a Linux distribution, we create it as follows:

Now, we can navigate inside the “myPet” folder and create the Terraform configuration file which is “main.tf”.

Now, we create our configuration file. Next, we open an IDE and write the code to provision the resources that we need by Terraform. The following is the code:

As you can see, we created a resource block including the “local_file” as the resource type and “myPet” as the resource name. You can choose any resource name, but it must be relevant to the subject.

As the attributes, we have “filename” which specifies the location for the file creation and the file name with the file extension. Then, we have “content” which stores the text that needs to be included in the text file.

Now, as the last step, we can initialize our Terraform folder.

It gives us the following output:

As you can see, we successfully initialized our Terraform folder.

Conclusion

As we learned, initializing the Terraform folder or the working directory is the first step in provisioning and managing the IT infrastructure components using the Terraform tool. Without initializing it, we can’t perform the other major actions such as Terraform plan, apply, etc. We discussed four main steps to initialize a Terraform folder from scratch, along with an example.

So, it is our responsibility to utilize the “terraform init” command to have a better and smoother infrastructure provisioning and management experience with Terraform.