Most editors have Terraform support through plugins. IntelliJ has a really nice one, so does Visual Studio Code.
Use your favorite package manager, most have a Terraform package.
On OSX with homebrew: brew install terraform
Alternatively, you can install tfenv which is a tool managing Terraform versions depending on projects.
On OSX: brew install tfenv
This repository has a .terraform-version file so you simply can issue: tfenv install in the directory and it will
install and select the expected version.
For a specific version: tfenv install 0.12.2.
More on tfenv here.
Check the current version you have: terraform version
This is a simple setup to run Terraform on AWS. It uses profiles from the go and avoids having AWS credentials near the project folder.
Again most package managers have it. On OSX with homebrew: brew install awscli.
This is not strictly necessary for Terraform itself, but it can be handy to have it around and has a
wizard to setup AWS.
You can sign up here if you have no account.
Go to the IAM service page, select the Users sidebar link. Click the Add user button, fill in a name
for this user, we will use hello in this example. Tick both the Programmatic access and
the AWS Management Console access check boxes (so you can also use this user to access the Web Console,
you should limit as much as possible using the root account).
For the Console password radio selector below, select Custom password, and fill in a strong password preferably generated with a password manager - and save it your password manager.
Unselect the Require password reset checkbox. Then hit the Next button.
On the Set permissions (Step 2) screen, click on the Attach existing policies directly tab, then select
the AdministratorAccess policy from the list. Hit the Next button, then the Next button again.
On the Review screen (Step 4), check the username, and the Permissions summary which should contain
AdministratorAccess, then confirm creation by clicking on the Create user button.
Stay on the success screen, as you have to save the Access Key ID, and Secret Access Key. Run the following:
aws configure --profile hello
AWS Access Key ID [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Default region name [None]: eu-west-1
Default output format [None]: json
It will prompt for the Access Key ID, and Secret Access Key, a default region and default format for outputs,
and it will create for you the ~/.aws folder with credentials and config files in it.
Start a shell you will use for all your Terraform commands for this project, and run the following in it:
# export AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE=hello
export AWS_PROFILE=sandbox
Make sure to check the current default profile if you switch between shells before running Terraform or the AWS CLI.
You can do so with echo $AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE.
You can check it's picking up the default profile and credentials you set up before by issuing:
aws iam get-user