Terraform Learning¶

A working notebook, not a tutorial. Everything here was written while learning Terraform against a real GCP project — the labs record what was actually run, the quiz questions come out of things that actually broke, and the session notes record the wrong answers as well as the right ones.

If you are looking for a specific concept rather than a place to start, go straight to the concept index — it maps every concept to its theory page, its local lab, its GCP lab, the sandbox file that uses it for real, and the quiz that tests it.

The path¶

Four stages, ordered by what it costs you to be wrong — which turns out to be the same as ordering by complexity.

	Stage	What it is	Needs	Costs
1	Theory	19 pages of definitions and mechanics, in dependency order — providers, state, expressions, modules, backends, the execution model	nothing	nothing
2	Basics	13 topics using `local`/`random`/`null`/`archive`. Real Terraform lifecycle, files on disk instead of cloud resources	Terraform	nothing
3	GCP	A full Terraform root against a real project, plus 18 lab notes — remote state, modules, workspaces, import, drift	a GCP project	cents
4	Sandbox	Five interdependent Terraform roots, a Consul contract, GKE, Cloud SQL, Helm, Workload Identity	GCP + patience	real money

Test yourself at any point with the quiz (33 questions across 6 topics), and read the session log for the narrative version — what was attempted, what failed, and why.

Every topic, in order¶

Stage 1 — Theory · nothing to install¶

Read in order; each page assumes only the one before it.

#	Page	#	Page
1	What Terraform is	11	Data sources
2	Providers and authentication	12	Modules
3	`init` and version constraints	13	State lifecycle
4	Resources and state	14	Backends and state security
5	Resource identity and change	15	Cross-config composition
6	Dependencies and the graph	16	GitOps and CI/CD
7	Variables and locals	17	Project structure
8	Expressions and conditionals	18	CLI reference
9	`count`, `for_each`, `dynamic`	19	Glossary
10	Outputs

Stage 2 — Basics · no cloud, no cost¶

#	Topic	Code
1	Resources and state	`01-basics/1-create-local-file/`
2	Variables	`01-basics/2-variable-use/`
3	Locals	—
4	References and dependencies	`01-basics/3-…`, `01-basics/4-dependencies/`
5	Outputs	`01-basics/4-dependencies/explicit/`
6	Data sources	`01-basics/6-data-sources/`
7	count and for_each	—
8	Conditionals	—
9	Lifecycle	`01-basics/5-lifecycle/`
10	Validation and sensitive values	—
11	Provider versions	`01-basics/7-version-constraints/`
12	State surgery	—
13	Provisioners and archive_file	—

Stage 3 — GCP · cents¶

Page	Code
Prerequisites and cost	—
Core GCP root	`02-gcp-terraform/01-core-gcp-resources/`
Lab notes 1–18	`acme-sampleapp-…/`

Stage 4 — Sandbox · real money¶

Page	Code
The acme-sampleapp sandbox	`acme-sampleapp-…/`
Runbook	apply order, Consul dev agent, teardown

Code in this repository¶

01-basics/             8 local Terraform roots in 7 folders. No cloud, no auth, no cost.
02-gcp-terraform/      The same concepts against a real GCP project.
acme-sampleapp-.../    5 interdependent roots, Consul, GKE, Cloud SQL, Helm.

The code directories contain .tf files, plus a checked-in graph.svg in the two roots where the dependency graph is itself the lesson. Every explanation lives here in the docs, linked from the tables above, so there is one place to read and one place to run.

Running these docs locally¶

pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Or without installing anything into your environment:

uvx --with mkdocs-material mkdocs serve

Some pages embed diagrams generated from real Terraform state. To regenerate one (needs Graphviz):

terraform graph | dot -Tsvg > graph.svg