Mastering Terraform

2

Using HashiCorp Configuration Language

In the first chapter, we examined Terraform’s architecture. It is a simple command-line tool that takes in code and creates a plan that it can later execute at the user’s behest. In this chapter, we will examine how to leverage Terraform’s language—HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)—to define infrastructure as code so that we can build sophisticated cloud-based architectures using Terraform.

The chapter covers the following topics:

• Resources and data sources
• Locals and types
• Variables and outputs
• Meta arguments
• Loops and iterations
• Expressions
• Functions

Resources and data sources

Resources and data sources play a critical role in Terraform and are probably the most important language constructs ...