Day 6/30: Organising Terraform – File Structure Best Practices 📂✨

Day 6/30: Organizing Terraform – File Structure Best Practices 📂✨
Today marks Day 6 of my #30daysofAWSTerraform challenge! 🚀 As the codebase grows, keeping everything in a single main.tf file becomes unmanageable. Today, I learned how to modularize and…


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by GOKULPRASATH N

Day 6/30: Organizing Terraform – File Structure Best Practices 📂✨
Today marks Day 6 of my #30daysofAWSTerraform challenge! 🚀 As the codebase grows, keeping everything in a single main.tf file becomes unmanageable. Today, I learned how to modularize and organize Terraform files for better readability, maintainability, and scalability.
I refactored my monolithic code into a standard professional structure used by DevOps teams worldwide.

✅ Tasks Completed:

  1. Refactoring: Split the single main.tf into logical files (providers.tf, variables.tf, outputs.tf).
  2. Backend Isolation: Created a dedicated backend.tf to manage the Remote State configuration separately.
  3. Variable Management: Moved variable definitions to variables.tf and actual values to terraform.tfvars.
  4. Security Best Practices: Created a .gitignore file to prevent sensitive files like terraform.tfvars, .terraform/, and *.tfstate from being pushed to GitHub.

📝 Notes:
Standard File Structure:

  1. main.tf → Core resource definitions (EC2, VPC, S3).
  2. variables.tf → Declaration of input variables.
  3. outputs.tf → Definition of output values (e.g., IPs, IDs).
  4. providers.tf → Provider configuration and version constraints.
  5. terraform.tfvars → Environment-specific values (GitIgnored!). Why split? It makes collaboration easier, code reviews faster, and helps avoid merge conflicts in large teams.

🔗 Resources:
Video I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMsJholPkDY
Mentor: Piyush Sachdeva

I am excited to dive into Type Constraints tomorrow to make my variables even more robust!

AWS #Terraform #CloudEngineering #DevOps #InfrastructureAsCode #techtutorialswithpiyush #TheCloudOpsCommunity #30daysofAWSTerraform


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by GOKULPRASATH N


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