Learn to Provision Terraform Infrastructure using Packer & Cloud-Init
Try two new hands-on tutorials to learn best practices for using Terraform to provision infrastructure with Packer or Cloud-init.
Provisioners give Terraform practitioners a way to prep their infrastructure for use by installing software and deploying applications. While there are several avenues for provisioning infrastructure deployed with Terraform, Packer and Cloud-Init give practitioners repeatability in image deployment or built-in tools. Try our new tutorials to provision infrastructure following HashiCorp’s recommended best practices.
» Image Deployment with Packer
Packer is a HashiCorp tool that builds machine images. Packer allows you to pre-build golden images to deploy using Terraform, and supports a number of provisioning processes. This tutorial will teach you how to create a Packer image with all of the common dependencies you would need for deploying a web application, and build that image in Terraform.
Provision Infrastructure with Packer
» Cloud-Init deployment
Cloud-init is a standard configuration support tool available on most Linux distributions and all major cloud providers. It allows you to provision instances with a common scripting language. You will create a Terraform instance with a cloud-init script in your resource configuration. Once you apply your Terraform configuration containing the cloud-init script, your instance will be created to your specifications and will be able to run the web application deployed within the script.
Provision Infrastructure with Cloud-init
To learn more about provisioning in Terraform, visit the full collection of tutorials on the HashiCorp Learn site.
Sign up for the latest HashiCorp news
More blog posts like this one

Terraform now supports multiple team tokens
Teams in HCP Terraform can now generate multiple API tokens per team, making multi-pipeline management easier and more secure.

AWS and AWSCC Terraform providers: Better together
Manage your cloud infrastructure with the AWS and AWSCC Terraform providers and view strategies on how to move state between providers.

Protect data privacy in Amazon Bedrock with Vault
This demo shows how Vault transit secrets engine protects data used for RAG in an Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Base created by Terraform.