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Terraforming a Terraform Project

Posted on 2 mins read

I am back with another fun use of Terraform. I have this silly idea to bootstrap a Terraform project using Terraform. It’s a pretty interesting idea and these thought exercises push your understanding of what is possible. Let’s get into it.

Creating the project

I will be using the local provider and HashiCorp’s recommended project structure. The first step is to add our provider.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    local = {
      source  = "hashicorp/local"
      version = "2.2.3"
    }
  }
}

provider "local" {
  # Configuration options
}

Now we can create a variable that will define the path we want to use for our project.

variable "path" {
  description = "The path to creating a Terraform project/module."
  type        = string
}

Finally, we can create our three files: main.tf, variables.tf, and outputs.tf. We will use the local_file resource to do it.

resource "local_file" "main" {
  content  = ""
  filename = "${var.path}/main.tf"
}

resource "local_file" "variables" {
  content  = ""
  filename = "${var.path}/variables.tf"
}

resource "local_file" "outputs" {
  content  = ""
  filename = "${var.path}/outputs.tf"
}

Using the Terraform

The basics are in place to use Terraform to create a project. Let’s do that now.

$ terraform apply -auto-approve -var path=../test

Terraform used the selected providers to generate the following execution plan. Resource actions are indicated with the
following symbols:
  + create

Terraform will perform the following actions:

  # local_file.main will be created
  + resource "local_file" "main" {
      + directory_permission = "0777"
      + file_permission      = "0777"
      + filename             = "../test/main.tf"
      + id                   = (known after apply)
    }

  # local_file.outputs will be created
  + resource "local_file" "outputs" {
      + directory_permission = "0777"
      + file_permission      = "0777"
      + filename             = "../test/outputs.tf"
      + id                   = (known after apply)
    }

  # local_file.variables will be created
  + resource "local_file" "variables" {
      + directory_permission = "0777"
      + file_permission      = "0777"
      + filename             = "../test/variables.tf"
      + id                   = (known after apply)
    }

Plan: 3 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
local_file.main: Creating...
local_file.outputs: Creating...
local_file.variables: Creating...
local_file.variables: Creation complete after 0s [id=da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709]
local_file.outputs: Creation complete after 0s [id=da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709]
local_file.main: Creation complete after 0s [id=da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709]

Apply complete! Resources: 3 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

We can go check to see if the files are created in our directory.

ls ../test
main.tf  outputs.tf  variables.tf

Looks like the files exist.

Wrapping up

I hope you had some fun following along with this tangent. There are a ton of other options to explore.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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