Understanding Terraform meta-arguments

Meta-arguments are special constructs in Terraform. You already encountered the provider meta-argument, but let’s look closely at it and other meta-arguments.

The provider meta-argument

Note

The code for this section is under chap02/provider in the GitHub repo of this book.

We introduced the provider meta-argument in the first chapter. Technically speaking, a provider is a plugin that communicates with the external API—in our case, the Google Cloud API. As mentioned, there are actually two providers for Google Cloud: google and google-beta. The latter provides the interface to the Google Beta API while the former provides the interface to the API that is in General Availability (GA). You can use both providers in your configuration code, and specify which provider you want to use for a resource:

chap02/provider/provider.tf

…
provider "google" {
  project = var.project_id
  region...