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Yusuf Adeyemo
Yusuf Adeyemo

Posted on • Originally published at blog.yusadolat.me on

5 tools to supercharge your Terraform Development

5 terrform tools
Want to take your Terraform development to the next level? Look no further! Introducing the 5 tools to supercharge your Terraform development: Terragrunt, Terratest, Terraform-docs, TFLint, and Infracost. These powerful tools will help you to organize and test your Terraform code, generate documentation, catch errors early, and estimate the monthly cost of running infrastructure. Say goodbye to manual and tedious tasks and hello to efficient and effective infrastructure management with these must-have tools.

  1. Terragrunt: This tool is a thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra features, such as locking for Terraform state and the ability to keep your Terraform configurations DRY. With Terragrunt, you can organize your Terraform code into reusable modules, and reuse those modules across multiple projects. This helps to keep your Terraform code organized and reduces duplicated effort.

  2. Terratest: This is a Go library that makes it easier to write automated tests for your Terraform code. Terratest provides utility functions for interacting with Terraform, as well as libraries for common infrastructure-as-code tools, such as AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes. With Terratest, you can write tests that check that your Terraform code creates the resources it should, that the resources are configured correctly, and that they can be destroyed.

  3. Terraform-docs: This tool generates documentation for your Terraform modules in various formats, such as Markdown, HTML, and JSON. Terraform-docs parses your Terraform code and extracts documentation from comments, variable and output descriptions, and input/output examples. The tool then generates a table of contents with links to the relevant documentation for each module, which makes it easy to understand the purpose and usage of each module.

  4. TFLint: This is a Terraform linter that checks for errors and best practices in your Terraform code. TFLint helps to catch common mistakes, such as variable name clashes, missing required variables, or invalid resource arguments. It also checks for compliance with best practices, such as naming conventions and resource ordering. By using TFLint, you can catch errors early on, which helps to improve the quality of your Terraform code.

  5. Infracost : Infracost is an open-source tool that allows users to see the cost of running their infrastructure, such as AWS resources, in near real-time. It uses the AWS Price List API to determine the costs of resources, and can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to provide cost feedback during the development process. This allows developers to make informed decisions about their infrastructure and optimize costs. Additionally, Infracost can be used to create alerts based on cost thresholds, so you can be notified when your infrastructure costs exceed a certain amount. This can be especially useful for teams that operate on a tight budget or need to manage costs closely.

In conclusion, the five tools discussed in this article can greatly enhance the development experience when working with Terraform. By incorporating these tools into your development process, you can increase productivity, and improve the reliability and maintainability of your infrastructure code. With these tools, you can supercharge your Terraform development and take your infrastructure as code to the next level.

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