Terraform. We’ve all heard the following phrase, or, if you haven’t, here ya go;

“Terraform has become the de-facto platform for infrastructure as code in the public cloud.”

Well, guess that means some old dogs need to learn new tricks.

What is Terraform?

The definition pulled straight from the source:

“HashiCorp Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.”

What this means, is you have a document that specifies the blueprint for the deployment, and you can copy-paste the needed preferences, (as well as adjust afterwards which is a total gas.) So upon reading this, it made me immediately want to get into it. Let’s be real, no one likes using the cloud client to migrate your blueprints…it’s just not enjoyable (If you enjoy it, why/how?). This is really something I wanted to look into. And well Then this happened.

WHAT IaC and with vRA…..

Idk what more needs to be said. Sounds cool, looks cool. Lets get to it…

Terraform Install

There are a lot of docs out there for installing Terraform. Terraform.io has some great links itself. Obviously their link for doing the install of linux and windows works well out of the box. But what about Mac? Well, my recent purchase of a Mac to prove to others that I wasn’t a normal windows snob, has driven me to extremes lately. Its just not the same, and WHY DON’T THE DANG WINDOWS CLOSE!

Anywho, I tried to follow the linux installation for Mac. Then I google’d how to get to the elusive /usr/ folder, then I realized I was an idiot, and installed Terraform. Then the path setting was the next thing. I’d set it and try… nope… try to reset it again and try… nope…. I only had about 10 minutes left then God opened the cloudy skies above…

Homebrew…

For those that don’t use Homebrew, Here’s Cody De Arkland(anyone with De in the name = De Man).

For a guy that uses the term “dope” a lot. I dig it. So, I typed in “brew install terraform” after installing Homebrew (See link) and life was good again. Did a quick Terraform -version..

VOILA. Good times man… now to start with this whole Terraform configuration thing…