Are you new to Cloud, if yes then consider learning the most widely used open-source tool to automate your infrastructure using Terraform the Infrastructure as a code tool?

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to Install and set up Terraform on Windows Machine step by step.

Let’s dive into it

Table of Content

1. What is Terraform ?
2. Prerequisites
3. How to Install Terraform on a Windows machine
4. Creating an IAM user in AWS account with programmatic access
5. Configure AWS credentials using aws configure
6. Verify aws configure from AWS CLI by running a simple commands
7. Creating AWS EC2 Instance Using Terraform
8. Conclusion

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a tool for building, versioning, and changing the infrastructure. Terraform is Written in GO Language, and the syntax language of configuration files is HashiCorp configuration language(HCL) which is much easier than yaml or json.

Terraform is used with various cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Oracle, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.

Prerequisites

• Any Windows Machine should work but this tutorial will use Windows 10 Machine.
• Notepad or Notepad ++ or Visual Studio code editor on your windows Machine to create terraform configuration files. To install visual code studio click here.

Related: How to Install Terraform on an Ubuntu machine

How to Install Terraform on a Windows machine

Now that you have a basic idea about terraform let’s kick off this tutorial by first installing terraform on a Windows machine.

• First open your favorite browser and download the appropriate version of Terraform from HashiCorp’s download Page. This tutorial will download terraform 0.13.0 version but you will find latest versions on the Hashicorps download page.

• Make a folder on your C:\ drive where you can put the Terraform executable something Like  C:\tools where you can put binaries.

• Extract the zip file to the folder C:\tools

• Now Open your Start Menu and type in “environment” and the first thing that comes up should be Edit the System Environment Variables option. Click on that and you should see this window.

• Now under System variables look for Path and edit it.

• Click New and add the folder path where terraform.exe is located to the bottom of the list. By adding the terraform.exe in PATH will allow you to execute terraform command from anywhere in the system.

• Click OK on each of the menus and further open command prompt or PowerShell to check if terraform is properly added in PATH by running the command terraform from any location.

• Verify the installation was successful by entering terraform --version. If it returns a version, you’re good to go.

Creating an IAM user in AWS account with programmatic access

There are two ways to connect to an AWS account, the first is providing a username and password on the AWS login page and another is configuring the Access key ID and secret keys of IAM users in AWS CLI to connect programmatically.

Earlier, you installed AWS CLI successfully on a Windows machine, but you will need an IAM user with programmatic access to run commands from it.

Let’s learn how to create an IAM user in an AWS account with programmatic access, Access key ID, and secret keys.

1. Open your favorite web browser and navigate to the AWS Management Console and log in.
2. While in the Console, click on the search bar at the top, search for ‘IAM’, and click on the IAM menu item.

3. To Create a user click on Users→ Add user and provide the name of the user myuser and make sure to tick the Programmatic access checkbox in Access type which enables an access key ID and secret access key and then hit the Permissions button.

4. Now select the “Attach existing policies directly” option in the set permissions and look for the “Administrator” policy using filter policies in the search box. This policy will allow myuser to have full access to AWS services.

5. Finally click on Create user.
6. Now, the user is created successfully and you will see an option to download a .csv file. Download this file which contains IAM users i.e. myuser Access key ID and Secret access key which you will use later in the tutorial to connect to AWS service from your local machine.

Configure AWS credentials using aws configure in AWS CLI

You are an IAM user with Access key ID and secret keys, but AWS CLI cannot perform anything unless you configure AWS credentials. Once you configure the credentials, AWS CLI allows you to connect to the AWS account and execute commands.

• Configure AWS Credentials by running the aws configure command on command prompt.

aws configure

• Enter the details such as AWS Access key ID, Secret Access Key, region. You can skip the output format as default or text or json .

• Once AWS is configured successfully , verify by navigating to C:\Users\YOUR_USER\.aws  and see if two file credentials and config are present.

• Now open both the files and verify and you can see below you’re AWS credentials are configured successfully using aws configure.

Verify aws configure from AWS CLI by running a simple commands

Now, you can test if AWS Access key ID, Secret Access Key, region you configured in AWS CLI is working fine by going to command prompt and running the following commands.

aws ec2 describe-instances

• You can also verify the AWS CLI by listing the buckets in your acount by running the below command.

aws cli s3

Creating AWS EC2 Instance Using Terraform

In this demonstration, you will learn how to create Amazon Web Service (AWS) EC2 instance using Terraform commands on a Windows machine. Lets dive in.

• First, create a folder Terraform-EC2-simple-demo on your desktop or any location on Windows Machine.

• Now create a file main.tf inside the folder you’re in and copy/paste the below content.

resource "aws_instance" "my-machine" {          # This is Resource block where we define what we need to create

  ami = var.ami                                 # ami is required as we need ami in order to create an instance
  instance_type = var.instance_type             # Similarly we need instance_type
}

• Create one more file named vars.tf file under Terraform-EC2-simple-demo folder and copy/paste the content below. The vars.tf file contains the variables that you referred in main.tf file.

variable "ami" {                       # We are declaring the variable ami here which we used in main.tf
  type = string      
}

variable "instance_type" {             # We are declaring the variable instance_type here which we used in main.tf
  type = string 
}

To select the the image ID ( ami ), navigate to the LaunchInstanceWizard and search for ubuntu in the search box to get all the ubuntu image IDs. This tutorial will use Ubuntu Server 18.04.LTS image.

• Create one more file output.tf file under Terraform-EC2-simple-demomo folder and paste the content below. This file will allow Terraform to display he output after running terraform apply command.

output "ec2_arn" {
  value = aws_instance.my-machine.arn    
}  

• Create provider.tf file under Terraform-EC2-simple-demo folder and paste the content below.

provider "aws" {     # Defining the Provider Amazon  as we need to run this on AWS  
  region = "us-east-2"
}

• Create terraform.tfvars file under Terraform-EC2-simple-demo folder and paste the content below. This file contains the value of Terraform vaiables declared in vars.tf file.

ami = "ami-013f17f36f8b1fefb" 
instance_type = "t2.micro"

• Now your files and code are ready for execution and the folder structure should look something like below.

• Now your files and code are ready for execution. Initialize the terraform using the terraform init command.

terraform init

• Terraform initialized successfully , now its time to run the plan command which provides you the details of the deployment. Run terraform plan command to confirm if correct resources is going to provisioned or deleted.

terraform plan

• After verification, now its time to actually deploy the code using terraform apply command.

terraform apply

Great Job; terraform commands were executed successfully. Now you should have the AWS EC2 instance launched in AWS Cloud.

Generally takes a minute or so to launch an instance, and yes, you can see that the instance is successfully launched now in the us-east-2 region as expected.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned What is terraform, how to Install Terraform on the Windows machine and launch an ec2 instance on an AWS account using terraform.

Now that you have the AWS EC2 instance launched, what are you planning to deploy next using Terraform?