Providers

Providers are plugins

A provider teaches Terraform how to manage a class of resources—files locally, DNS records, VMs, and more.

Local file provider example

Safe for learning: manage files on disk. Save as main.tf:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    local = {
      source  = "hashicorp/local"
      version = "~> 2.5"
    }
  }
}

provider "local" {}

Initialize the working directory

Downloads provider plugins into .terraform.

terraform init

Cloud providers later

AWS, Azure, and Google providers need credentials. Practice locally first, then add a cloud provider with a free-tier account and strict destroy habits.