Terraform providers and provisioners are provided via plugins.
Terraform is a mature project with a growing community.
These text files are called Terraform configurations and end in. tf.
In Terraform 0.7 we merged all of the programs into the same binary.
In versions of Terraform prior to 0.7, each plugin shipped as a separate binary.
It may be helpful
in certain special use cases or to help debug Terraform issues.
In previous versions of Terraform all of the plugins were included in a zip file.
Setting-parallelism is considered
an advanced operation and should not be necessary for normal usage of Terraform.
When visualizing a configuration with Terraform graph, you can see all of these nodes present.
The Terraform show command is used to provide
human-readable output from a state or plan file.
In essence, Terraform now just calls itself in order to
activate the special behavior in each plugin.
In versions of Terraform >= 0.7,
all of the official plugins are shipped as a single binary.
Terraform builds a dependency graph from the Terraform configurations,
and walks this graph to generate plans, refresh state, and more.
The content is organized
from simplest to most complex- developers new to writing code for Terraform should start at the top.
The JSON format is meant for machines to create, modify, and update,
but can also be done by Terraform operators if you prefer.
And because Terraform shares a lot of code with its plugins,
there is a lot of binary data duplicated between each of these programs.
If you are looking for information on using Terraform with any of the existing Plugins, please refer
to the Docs section of this website.
Converting a resource to be importable is also relatively simple,
so if you're interested in contributing that functionality, the Terraform team would be grateful.
This can be used to inspect a plan to ensure that the planned operations are expected,
or to inspect the current state as Terraform sees it.
In order to safely and predictably change and iterate infrastructure, Terraform needs to be able to detect changes
made outside of it's configuration and provide means of reconciliation.
In order to deliver on our promise to be safe and predictable,
we need to be able to easily and routinely verify that Terraform Plugins produce the expected outcome.
Going forward there is only one file in the distribution so you will need to
perform a one-time cleanup when upgrading from Terraform < 0.7 to Terraform 0.7 or higher.
While each Provider is unique, over the years we have accumulated some patterns that should be adhered to in order to
ensure a consistent user experience when using Terraform for any given provider.
Terraform can be extended to allow users
to manage more infrastructure providers with Providers(containing Resources and/or Data Sources), more options to store Terraform state with Backends and more options to provision instance with Provisioners.
This makes it easy for you to build a Terraform plugin for your organization's internal use,
for a proprietary API that you don't want to open source, or to prototype something before contributing it back to the main project.
Terraform is an open source project with a large community,
and while we maintain a wide range of plugins as part of the core distribution, we also want to make it easy for people anywhere to write and use their own plugins.