4. Using Terraform with Git

It is extremely common to use Git to provide source control for Terraform configurations. Entire DevOps ecosystems have been created around this relationship, and I would be remiss to not include a section on some best-practices related to the .gitignore file.

As you almost certainly know, the .gitignore file is used to exclude files from being included by git, and there are some files you really don’t want included in your git repository. I’ve provided a list of these files below and urge you to use the .gitignore file to exclude them.

  • .terraform/

    • Directory containing the dowloaded Providers and files pertaining to the modules defined in your Terraform configuration.

    • Add the following to .gitignore: .terraform*

  • .terraform.lock.hcl

    • File containing a list of the downloaded Providers and the hashes associated with each

    • Add the following to .gitignore: .terraform*

      • .terraform* excludes both the .terraform.lock.hcl file and the .terraform/ directory

  • .terraform.tfstate & .terraform.tfstate.backup

    • File containing the current state of any resources deployed by Terraform (see above)

    • Add the following to .gitignore: terraform.tfstate*

      • Excludes both the terraform.tfstate and the terraform.tfstate.backup files.

More complex Terraform configurations might include an output directory for post-procesing template files, as well as a directory within which those template files might be stored. I names those directories work_tmp and templates, respectively. The templates directory should be included in a Git repository; however, the directory containing the post-processing versions of those templates should not, so I add that directory to my .gitignore.

The complete list of .gitignore additions would be:

.terraform*
.terraform.tfstate*
work_tmp/