Terraform Basics Cheatsheet

These are the most common commands you will use in your day-to-day Terraform workflow.

• terraform init: Initializes a working directory containing Terraform configuration files. This is the first command that should be run after writing a new Terraform configuration.
• terraform plan: Creates an execution plan. Terraform performs a refresh, unless explicitly disabled, and then determines what actions are necessary to achieve the desired state specified in the configuration files.
• terraform apply: Executes the actions proposed in a Terraform plan to create, update, or destroy infrastructure.
• terraform destroy: Destroys all remote objects managed by a particular Terraform configuration.

Providers are plugins that Terraform uses to interact with cloud providers, SaaS providers, and other APIs.

# main.tf
 
terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.0"
    }
  }
}
 
provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-2"
}

Resources are the most important element in the Terraform language. Each resource block describes one or more infrastructure objects, such as virtual networks, compute instances, or higher-level components.

resource "aws_instance" "web_server" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
 
  tags = {
    Name = "HelloWorld"
  }
}