One of the best things about being a digital transformation leader in the cloud space is the humbling experience of working with so many smart, talented, creative, driven, and hard-working engineers. Over the past several years, our team has worked together to go from mostly manual and error prone deployments to fully automated infrastructure deployments with Terraform for all of our applications.

Additionally, we have partnered with our application development teams to extend the app tech stack to include cloud infrastructure code management as part of a shift-left journey to enable teams to more completely manage their apps ecosystem.

As part of these efforts, I have found a lot of the same questions about Terraform commands have come up repeatedly with teams looking for the best way to get started. With a shortage of high-quality and to-the-point cheatsheets for Terraform out there, I thought I would create one for the community.

Note that this cheatsheet is not intended to have every possible command or combination of options (that is what the documentation is for), but rather to provide a list of some of the most commonly used commands.

I hope that the members of our vibrant and ever-growing DevOps community find this helpful. Please let me know if there is anything you would improve and I will publish a new version with aggregated inputs incorporated! Keep coding out there!

The Essential Terraform Cheatsheet by Justin Solomon O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://justinoconnor.codes/2021/09/06/the-essential-terraform-cheat-sheet/.