[/] Make sure to have AWS account setup
- Install AWS CLI
- Configure AWS credentials
[/] Write Terraform configuration to launch a single AWS instance
[/] Initialize directory
- terraform init
[/] Format and validate the configuration
- terraform fmt
- terraform validate
[/] Create an AWS EC2 instance
- terraform apply run in the same directory as
main.tf
[/] Inspect newly created AWS EC2 instance
- terraform show
[/] Change Infrastructure
[/] Destroy newly created AWS EC2 instance
[/] Define input variables
Terraform considers a configuration as the set of files that is used to describe Terraform infrastructure.
The terraform {} block is necessary so that Terraform knows which provider to download from the Terraform Registry. In the example configuration, the provider was for aws.
The provider{} block configures a provider (in the example we used aws) that creates or manages the resources for the instance. A provider is a Terraform plugin which integrates with the API from the service (aws).
Multiple providers can be set from different providers. Multiple providers can be used together as well.
The profile ="" attribute in the example refers Terraform to the AWS credentials stored locally.
The resource block defines a part of the infrastructure. An example of a resource is an EC2 instance or a Heroku application (physical or logical).
The arguments for the resource block can define machine sizes, disk image names, VPC IDs, etc. The providers reference documents shows required and optional arguments for each resource provider (aws in the example).
In the example, a EC2 instance is being created with a specified AMI for Ubuntu as a t2.micro instance which falls under the free AWS tier.