Terraform Plugin Types

Terraform is logically split into two main parts: Terraform Core and Terraform Plugins. Each plugin exposes an implementation for a specific service, such as the AWS provider or bash provisioner. Terraform Plugins are written in Go and are executable binaries executed as a separate process and communicate with the main Terraform binary over an RPC interface. The network communication and RPC is handled automatically by higher-level Terraform libraries, so developers need only worry about the implementation of their specific Plugin behavior.

There are two types of plugins supported by Terraform:

Providers

Providers are the most common type of Plugin, which expose the features that a specific service offers via its application programming interface (API). Providers define Resources and are responsible for managing their life cycles. Examples of providers are the Amazon Web Service Provider or the Google Cloud Provider. Example resources are aws_instance and google_compute_instance.

Terraform Providers contain all the code needed to authenticate and connect to a service on behalf of the user. Each Resource implements CREATE, READ, UPDATE, and DELETE (CRUD) methods to manage itself, while Terraform Core manages a Resource Graph of all the resources declared in the configuration as well as their current state. Resources remain ignorant of the current state, only responding to method calls from Terraform Core and performing the matching CRUD action.

Terraform determines the Providers needed by reading and interpolating configuration files. Terraform will dynamically discover and fetch the needed providers from releases.hashicorp.com, or from specific locations on disk. At time of writing, the source code for all Providers distributed by HashiCorp for automatic discovery are hosted on in the terraform-providers GitHub Organization.

Visit the Provider index in our documentation section to learn more about our existing Providers.

Provisioners

Provisioners are used to execute scripts on a local or remote machine as part of resource creation or destruction. Provisioners can be used to bootstrap a resource, cleanup before destroy, run configuration management, etc.

The official Terraform Provisioners are included in the Terraform Core codebase and are compiled into the terraform binary. While they are built in, Provisioners are still executed in a separate process over RPC, and benefit from the same discovery process as Terraform Providers, making custom Provisioners just as easy to create and use.

Visit the Provisioners index in our documentation section to learn more about our existing Provisioners.