Working with multiple providers in Terraform

Using multiple providers in Terraform configuration file

- The first thing that we have to do after creating the configuration file with terraform is to run the terraform init command

- The terraform init command will check the configuration file and initialize the providers needed to let terraform interact with the infrastructure

- As long as we still work with the same providers, there is no need to execute this command again

- for example, we can add in the configuration file another resource block for creating another file

* for the resource name: i will call it "count"

* for the filename: i will call it 'count.txt'

* and for the content: i will store in this file this value "50"

-now, since the local provider was already initialized, there is no need to execute the terraform init command again

- so let's run the terraform plan command to see the execution plan

- we are happy with that, let's run now the terraform apply command

- so now, a new file called count.txt was created

- we will use now another provider, called random, which is a logical provider, and that means

that it works entirely within terraform's logic and it does not interact with any other service

- using this provider, we can create a set of resources such as a random_id, a random_interger,

a random string and a fiew other resources

- in our situation, we want to use the random provider to generate a random integer

- so, let's add here a new resource block. the resource type is random_integer

- let's give a name to our resource, for example random_int

- here the required arguments are the max and min arguments

so for example min = 10 and max = 20

- if run now the terraform plan command, we will get an error telling us the we are using a provider

that is not already initialized which is the random provider

-so when we make use of a new provider that is not already initialized we have to run the terraform

init command to initialize this provider.

- so let's execute the terraform init command to initialize the random provider

- we see here in the output of this command that terraform install the random provider and make use

of the previously installed local provider

- we can verify that by checking the content of the .terraform folder. so now two providers are

initialized the local provider and the random provider

- let's see now the execution plan with the terraform plan command.

- so you see here that a new resource of type random_interger will be created

- let's now apply the execution plan using the terraform apply command

- now a random integer was created and you can see this integer using the terraform show command

-so the lesson here is that whenever we make use of a new provider, we have to run the terraform

init command to initialize this provider