Got the fundamentals? A structured Terraform course is a fast way to level up.
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- 01Getting Started
- 02What Is Terraform?
- 03Checking the Version with terraform version
- 04What Is Infrastructure as Code?
- 05What Is a Provider?
- 06Preparing Providers with terraform init
- 07What Is a Resource Block?
- 08Checking Syntax with terraform validate
- 09Formatting Code with terraform fmt
- 10Previewing Changes with terraform plan
- 11Building Infrastructure with terraform apply
- 12What Is tfstate?
- 13Viewing State with terraform show
- 14Listing Resources with terraform state list
- 15Inspecting One Resource with terraform state show
- 16What Are Variables?
- 17What Are Outputs?
- 18Reading Outputs with terraform output
- 19Tearing Down with terraform destroy
- 20What Is a Module?
- 21What Is a Workspace?
- 22Listing Workspaces with terraform workspace list
- 23Creating a Workspace with terraform workspace new
- 24Switching Workspaces with terraform workspace select
- 25Saving a Plan with terraform plan -out
- 26Applying a Saved Plan with terraform apply
- 27What Is State Locking?
- 28Listing Providers with terraform providers
- 29What Is terraform refresh?
- 30What Is a Remote Backend?
- 31Adopting Existing Resources with terraform import
- 32What Is depends_on?
- 33What Are for_each and count?
- 34Visualising Dependencies with terraform graph
- 35What Is State Drift?
- 36How to Think About Splitting Modules
- 37Hands-On: Building a Three-Tier Web Architecture with Terraform
What Is Terraform?
This lesson is for anyone asking what Terraform is for. Terraform is a tool for defining infrastructure — servers, networks, databases — in configuration files, and creating it from them.
Instead of clicking through a cloud console, you write what you want in files, and Terraform works out what to create, change or destroy to match.
Because the configuration lives in files, it goes into version control: you can review changes, see who changed what, and rebuild an identical environment from scratch.
A common stumble is making a change by hand in the console afterwards. Terraform then sees a difference between reality and its records, and may undo your change on the next apply.
In real work, Terraform is the de facto standard for managing cloud infrastructure, and it speaks to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and hundreds of other providers through one consistent workflow.
🧑💻 You can type this command into the Terraform pseudo terminal to try it yourself (this page itself has no interactive terminal).