hands-on lab

Using Provisioners with Terraform

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 30 minutes
Students: 3,240
Rating: 4.5/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
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Description

Terraform uses HCL, a declarative language that is great for managing the abundance of cloud resources. However, it's declarative nature introduces pain points in automation tasks where procedural languages like PowerShell or Bash perform much better. Provisioners can help with this by automating additional steps when creating or destroying Terraform resources. They can be a powerful tool in the Terraform developer's toolbelt. However, it's important to know from the start that with provisioners comes a cost. Introducing provisioners into Terraform code can cause the code to become complex and introduce other pain points like network or software dependencies in the Terraform configuration. This is why it is important to be aware of how to use provisioners and understand that they should be used as a last resort when developing a solution.

In this lab, you will learn how to create a provisioner to automate additional tasks when creating and destroying an ECR resource.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

  • Understand how to create Terraform provisioners
  • Know when to use provisioners

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Individuals studying to take the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate exam
  • Anyone interested in learning how to use Terraform to manage Cloud Service Providers

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

Updates

October 28th, 2024 - Resolved an issue preventing the lab from provisioning successfully

April 24th, 2023 - Resolved IDE delay

April 28th, 2022 - Resolved lab setup issue

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Create a Terraform Provisioner