Learn How to Use the Magic of Terraform Locals — Step-by-Step Guide

If you’re a DevOps engineer or cloud infrastructure professional, you’ve probably heard of Terraform. This powerful tool allows you to manage and automate your cloud resources with a simple configuration language. But have you ever struggled with organizing and referencing your Terraform variables and resources? Enter Terraform locals.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Locals are a way to define and reference variables and resources within your Terraform code. They can help you improve the readability and organization of your code, making it easier for you and your team to understand and maintain. But how do you use them effectively? In this article, we’ll dive into the basics of Terraform locals and explore some practical examples of how to use them in your infrastructure as code. Whether you’re new to Terraform or a seasoned pro, this article has something for you.

So, what exactly are Terraform locals? Simply put, they are variables and resources that are defined and used within a single Terraform configuration file. They are a way to group related resources and variables together, making your code easier to read and maintain.

To define a local, you use the local block in your Terraform code. For example:

locals {
  variable1 = "value1"
  variable2 = "value2"
}