Installing Terraform is simple; go to https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html and follow the instructions for your platform. Most of it will require you to download a binary and move it to your system path.
Since we’ve been using Ubuntu throughout this book, I will show the installation on Ubuntu. Use the following commands to use the apt package manager to install Terraform:
$ wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | \
sudo gpg –dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
$ echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] \ https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main” | \ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install terraform
Check whether Terraform has been installed successfully with the following command:
$ terraform version
Terraform v1.5.2
It shows that Terraform has been installed successfully. Terraform uses Terraform providers to interact with cloud providers, so let’s look at those in the next section.
Terraform providers
Terraform has a decentralized architecture. While the Terraform CLI contains Terraform’s core functionality and provides all functionalities not related to any specific cloud provider, Terraform providers provide the interface between the Terraform CLI and the cloud providers themselves. This decentralized approach has allowed public cloud vendors to offer their Terraform providers so that their customers can use Terraform to manage infrastructure in their cloud. Such is Terraform’s popularity that it has now become an essential requirement for every public cloud provider to offer a Terraform provider.
We will interact with Azure for this chapter’s entirety and use the Azure Terraform provider for our activity.
To access the resources for this section, cd into the following:
$ cd ~/modern-devops/ch8/terraform-exercise/
Before we go ahead and configure the provider, we need to understand how Terraform needs to authenticate and authorize with the Azure APIs.
