Getting Started with Terraform - Second Edition

Using list variables

Continuing analogy with programming, list in Terraform is similar to arrays in most programming languages. There is a very nice place where we can use lists in our templates: security group.

Currently, an application module defines a single security group and assigns it to the instance. But an EC2 instance can have multiple security groups attached. We could have a default security group that allows an SSH access and then on an application level we have another one for app-specific permissions.

Let's add yet another variable to module/application/variables.tf, with an empty list as a default value:

variable "extra_sgs" { default = [] } 

Now, let's define a default security group in template.tf with SSH access allowed: ...