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Our documentation for how to contribute was in quite a state of disrepair, with some documents still describing things as they were before moving providers into separate repositories, others making assumptions about Go development that are no longer true in modules mode, and so forth. This is an attempt at a reset to a good state that should work with the codebase as it currently stands, and should hopefully serve as a basis for iterative improvement from here. These new instructions lean primarily on standard Go toolchain usage and instruct using the Makefile only for some Terraform-specific situations that the Go toolchain does not automatically handle. The idea here is that this direct usage of primary commands in the Go toolchain is less likely to be broken by changes in future Go releases, and should be immediately familiar to anyone who has experience with Go development.
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Terraform
- Website: https://www.terraform.io
- Mailing list: Google Groups
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
The key features of Terraform are:
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Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
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Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
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Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
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Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.
For more information, see the introduction section of the Terraform website.
Getting Started & Documentation
If you're new to Terraform and want to get started creating infrastructure, please checkout our Getting Started guide, available on the Terraform website.
All documentation is available on the Terraform website:
Developing Terraform
This repository contains only Terraform core, which includes the command line interface and the main graph engine. Providers are implemented as plugins that each have their own repository in the terraform-providers organization on GitHub. Instructions for developing each provider are in the associated README file. For more information, see the provider development overview.
To learn more about compiling Terraform and contributing suggested changes, please refer to the contributing guide.