Infrastructure as Code Cookbook

Generating meaningful outputs with Terraform

Wouldn't it be great if Terraform could show us useful, informational output after a successful run? Following what we've done so far, it would be helpful to know how to connect to the instance, what are the local and public IP addresses, or see the security groups used. That's what Terraform's outputs are for.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need the following:

• A working Terraform installation
• An AWS provider and an EC2 instance (using a SSH keypair and a Security Group), all configured in Terraform (refer to the previous recipes)
• An Internet connection

How to do it…

Thankfully, we can use the same syntax we're already using to access variables and attributes of references, but this time ...