moritzheiber/terraform

Terraform is a tool that lets you manage your cloud infrastructure, servers, databases, networks, and other resources, by writing configuration files instead of clicking through web consoles. Think of it as a way to describe your entire setup in text, so you can create, modify, and tear down resources in a predictable, repeatable way. The core idea is "infrastructure as code." You write a blueprint of what you want, and the tool figures out how to make it happen. Before making any changes, it generates an execution plan that shows you exactly what it will do, so there are no surprises. It also builds a dependency graph of your resources, which means it can create independent things in parallel for speed, and it understands the order requirements, for instance, a database needs to exist before you can point an app at it. This is useful for teams that manage environments across one or many cloud providers. A startup might use it to spin up identical staging and production setups. A larger company might use it to keep infrastructure definitions in version control, so changes go through code review just like application code. Anyone who has accidentally provisioned the wrong server size or forgotten to tear down a resource after testing can appreciate the safety of a preview-then-apply workflow. The project itself is written in Go and supports a plugin model for different cloud providers. The README is fairly sparse on end-user usage, it focuses mostly on how to contribute as a developer, including how to compile, run tests, and work with the codebase. For actual usage documentation, you are pointed to the project's website. One notable caveat for contributors: the acceptance tests create and destroy real cloud resources, which can incur real costs, so they recommend running those in an isolated account.