This is a series of blog posts going in to the setup of Terraform and building your first Azure deployment. First we are going to the local installation. Terraform is able to run on a variety of operating systems:
- MacOS
- FreeBSD
- Linux
- OpenBSD
- Solaris
- Windows
Since this blog Is mostly about Microsoft, Windows and Azure related stuff I’m going to cover the Windows version. Fist of all, download the Terraform executable for your Windows installation (32 of 64 bit) right here.
Extract the zip package to a location on your computer, for instance:
c:\Terraform
I would also recommend to add this location to the ‘PATH’ environmental variable in Windows so you can actually run this from any location so you don’t have to type extensive paths every time you are doing deployments.
To make it easy I’ve devised a PowerShell script:
# Terraform Executable location, modify for a different location
$TerraformPath='c:\Terraform'
# Get the PATH environmental Variable
$Path=(Get-ItemProperty -Path 'Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment' -Name PATH).Path
# Create New PATH environmental Variable
$NewPath=$Path+";"+$TerraformPath
# Set the New PATH environmental Variable
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment' -Name PATH –Value $NewPath
# Verify the Path
(Get-ItemProperty -Path 'Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment' -Name PATH).Path
This should allow you to run terraform from any path on your machine. You can try this opening a PowerShell session and running Terraform:
So the local terraform is all set up. That wasn’t too hard. In the next post I will visit the tools I use to write Terraform templates (and a lot of other scripts/things).