Getting started with Terraform and AWS

These are my notes from running through the Terraform getting started guide here:

https://www.terraform.io/intro/getting-started/install.html

to set up terraform (on a Mac) and provision a basic test instance in AWS.

Install process

This is very easy, simply download terraform for your platform (a single binary), extract it somewhere sensible and add that location to your PATH variable.

I set this up in my .profile, along the lines of:

export TFORM=/Users/donaldsimpson/TFORM
export PATH=$M2:$TFORM:$PATH

quick check that all looks ok:

Setup

As per the guide, the next steps are to get a note of your AWS access_key and secret_key from this AWS page, then create and edit a local “example.tf” file for your project, like this:

provider "aws" {
  access_key = "ACCESS_KEY_HERE"
  secret_key = "SECRET_KEY_HERE"
  region     = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-2757f631"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

I hit this issue: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/4367 as my AWS account is pretty old, and had to change the values for

ami = "ami-2757f631"
instance_type = "t2.micro"

to be:

ami = "ami-408c7f28"
instance_type = "t1.micro"

Terraform init

You should now be able to run terraform init and see something positive…

Check the plan

Running “terraform plan” provides a dry run/sanity check of what would be done

Make it so

terraform apply: run the plan, and actually create the resources listed above:

Show it is so

Once that has completed, you can check your AWS console and see the newly created instance:

“terraform show” can confirm the same details in a less pointy-clickety way:

Next steps

This was all pretty simple, quick and straightforward.

The next steps are to manage the hosts in an Infrastructure as Code manner, adding in changes and deletions/reprovisioning, and to do something useful with them.

I’d also like to try using Terraform with Digital Ocean and VMWare providers.