Introduction to Local Basics

What will we learn?

This section goes over the basic concepts of using Terraform. We’ll study Terraform resources, planning, state files, data sources, output, and destruction.

We’ll be using only local resources, such as local files on the host we run Terraform on, so that these concepts get fully embedded. It won’t necessarily look like the Terraform we might use at work, but it’s fundamentally the same and will give us a good foundation.

We’ll cover the following:

• In the “Terraform 101” lesson, we’ll walk through one of the simplest possible Terraform scripts. We’ll cover the following topics:

  • What are Terraform resources?
  • What is the path.module variable?
  • How does the terraform init command work?
  • What does the terraform apply command do?

• In the “Terraform State File” lesson, we’ll take a closer look at the state file.

• In the “Planning with Terraform” lesson, we’ll learn how to do the following:

  • Slow the process down a bit to give us more control.
  • Cover some new commands like terraform plan and terraform show.

• In the “Terraform Module Output” lesson, we’ll learn the following actions:

   - How data sources allow us to use inputs from outside the module.
   - How module output allows us to define a Terraform module.
  

• In the “Terraform Destroy” lesson, we’ll cover the following commands and actions:

  • The terraform plan -destroy command.
  • The terraform destroy command.
  • How we can Taint and untaint resources.