Use a Terraform wrapper script to easily manage Terraform installations

Terraform is a great tool for managing your cloud infrastructure resources using code. It supports Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and more. If you are looking to use Terraform for the first time, I recommend reading Introduction to Terraform.

This Terraform wrapper is a script that gets checked in with your Terraform project’s source code and automatically loads the appropriate version of Terraform for the particular project. It follows a pattern that I grew to appreciate as a Gradle user, the Gradle Wrapper (gradlew). For example, instead of running terraform init, you would run ./terraformw init.

As my clients are using many small Terraform projects, we found that we wanted a similar solution as gradlew that would provide the same benefits:

• Always use the correct version of Terraform for the current project / version
• Avoids the need for developers to install or update manually, and communication around those updates
• Avoids the need to separately install or update Terraform on CI server
• Easily manage multiple versions of Terraform

How to use

1. Copy this script into the root of your Terraform project directory(ies) as a file named terraformw.

#!/bin/bash
 
TERRAFORM_VERSION="0.11.1"
 
if [ -z ${TERRAFORM_BIN_PATH+x} ]; then
	TERRAFORM_BIN_PATH="$HOME/.terraform";
fi
 
platform='unknown'
unamestr=`uname`
if [[ "$unamestr" == 'Linux' ]]; then
   platform='linux'
elif [[ "$unamestr" == 'FreeBSD' ]]; then
   platform='freebsd'
elif [[ "$unamestr" == 'Darwin' ]]; then
   platform='darwin'
fi
 
arch="unknown"
unamestr=`uname -m`
if [[ "$unamestr" == 'x86_64' ]]; then
   arch='amd64'
elif [[ "$unamestr" == 'i686' ]]; then
   arch='386'
fi
 
TERRAFORM_URL="https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/$TERRAFORM_VERSION/terraform_$TERRAFORM_VERSION"_"$platform"_"$arch".zip
 
TERRAFORM_PATH="$TERRAFORM_BIN_PATH/$TERRAFORM_VERSION"
TERRAFORM_CMD="$TERRAFORM_PATH/terraform"
if ! type "$TERRAFORM_CMD" > /dev/null 2>&1; then
	echo "Downloading $TERRAFORM_URL"
	mkdir -p "$TERRAFORM_PATH"
	curl -s "$TERRAFORM_URL" -o $TERRAFORM_PATH.zip
	cd $TERRAFORM_PATH && unzip $TERRAFORM_PATH.zip && cd -
fi
 
$TERRAFORM_CMD $@

1. Update the TERRAFORM_VERSION variable to match the version of Terraform you are using.
2. Give the script executable permissions (chmod +x terraformw)
3. Run it instead of the terraform executable: ./terraformw plan -out plan.out
4. Commit the file to source control

There you have it! This is a pretty simple script but can save a lot of headaches when managing multiple projects or working with multiple DevOps engineers.

Final thoughts

Constantly-evolving tools are transforming the software development landscape, but there is little more frustrating than being unable to build or execute your code that was written just a few months ago due to a change in your tools or dependencies. A wrapper script like terraformw will help you keep your head screwed on straight.

Thanks to this gist by advincze which served as a starting point for this script.

Originally published at Object Partners.