Provisioners

Provisioners in Terraform are configuration blocks available for several resources that allow you to perform some actions after the resource has been created. It is mostly useful for servers, such as EC2 instances. Provisioners can be used to bootstrap the instance, to connect it to a cluster or to run tests, as we did manually in the previous section. There are the following four types of provisioners:

• local-exec
• remote-exec
• file
• chef

Each of them has its own applications and is useful for solving one issue or another. Let's take local-exec first and see how it can help in building inventory files for Ansible.

Provisioning with local-exec and Ansible

Ansible is one of the newest and hottest open source configuration management tools. It has become increasingly popular due to its ease of use. One of the main differences with Chef and Puppet is the lack of any agent installed on the machine to configure. The only requirement is that the machine has Python preinstalled, which is most...