Plan output reading in Terraform - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Plan output reading

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud infrastructure using Terraform. You want to see what changes Terraform will make before applying them. This helps you avoid surprises and understand the planned updates.

🎯 Goal: Build a Terraform configuration that defines a simple resource, run terraform plan to generate a plan output, and then read the plan output using Terraform commands.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Terraform configuration file with a resource

Initialize Terraform in the directory

Run terraform plan and save the output to a file

Use Terraform commands to read and show the plan output

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading Terraform plan outputs helps cloud engineers review infrastructure changes before applying them, preventing mistakes and downtime.

💼 Career

Understanding Terraform plan output reading is essential for roles like Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Infrastructure Developer.

1

Create Terraform configuration file

Create a file named main.tf with a resource block for an AWS S3 bucket named example_bucket with bucket name my-example-bucket-12345.

Terraform

# Create a resource block for aws_s3_bucket named example_bucket
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the resource keyword, specify aws_s3_bucket as the resource type, and name it example_bucket. Set the bucket attribute to "my-example-bucket-12345".

2

Initialize Terraform

Run terraform init in the directory to initialize Terraform and download the AWS provider plugin.

Terraform

# Run terraform init in your terminal
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Open your terminal and type terraform init to prepare Terraform for this configuration.

3

Run terraform plan and save output

Run terraform plan -out=plan.out to create a plan and save it to a file named plan.out.

Terraform

# Run terraform plan with output saved to plan.out
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the -out flag with terraform plan to save the plan to a file.

4

Show the saved plan output

Run terraform show plan.out to read and display the saved plan output file.

Terraform

# Run terraform show to display the saved plan
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use terraform show with the plan file name to see the planned changes.