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Terraform's design assumes that each remote object in Terraform's care is bound to one resource instance and one alone. If the same object is bound to multiple instances then confusing behavior will often result, such as two resource configurations competing to update a single object, or objects being "left behind" when all existing Terraform deployments are destroyed. This assumption was previously only implied, though. This change is an attempt to be more explicit about it, although these are additions to some older documentation sections that have not been revised for some time and so this is just a best effort to make this information discoverable without getting drawn into a full-on reorganization of these sections. While revising this there were some particular oddities that I decided to revise while I was there, but I'll leave a fuller revision of this older content for a later commit when we have more time to review it in greater detail.
Terraform
- Website: https://www.terraform.io
- Forums: HashiCorp Discuss
- Documentation: https://www.terraform.io/docs/
- Tutorials: HashiCorp's Learn Platform
- Certification Exam: HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
The key features of Terraform are:
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Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
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Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
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Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
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Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.
For more information, see the introduction section of the Terraform website.
Getting Started & Documentation
Documentation is available on the Terraform website:
If you're new to Terraform and want to get started creating infrastructure, please check out our Getting Started guides on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are also additional guides to continue your learning.
Show off your Terraform knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the certification page for information about exams and find study materials on HashiCorp's learning platform.
Developing Terraform
This repository contains only Terraform core, which includes the command line interface and the main graph engine. Providers are implemented as plugins that each have their own repository in the terraform-providers organization on GitHub. Instructions for developing each provider are in the associated README file. For more information, see the provider development overview.
To learn more about compiling Terraform and contributing suggested changes, please refer to the contributing guide.