What’s new in Terraform 1.6: Testing!

HashiCorp recently made <a href="https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.6.0" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Terraform 1.6</a> generally available. Let’s get into it! <h1>terraform test</h1> Now module maintainers can write tests for Terraform native to HCL. I’ll be writing a separate, deeper-dive article on the ins and outs of <code>terraform test</code> syntax, but for now, the basic highlights are: <ol> <li>Create tests defined in HCL within a <code>.tftest.hcl</code> file. HashiCorp has a good simple example that can be viewed <a href="https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/tests?ajs_aid=e20adfa8-4462-4806-9490-bdf9b49895cc&product_intent=terraform#example" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>.</li> <li>Run <code>terraform test</code> which provisions resources based on the test definitions, checks the configuration against required assertions, and then tears down all cloud resources.</li> </ol> This provides a clean way to test that a particular module of Terraform code behaves as expected, and is a large improvement over other ways of testing Terraform modules which include: <ul> <li>Testing in dev: Deploy new module changes within a development environment prior to releasing to production and ensure functionality is as expected. While this does work, when bugs occur it can result in a very slow cycle time while making corrections.</li> <li>Custom Ephemeral Pipelines: Build a custom CI pipeline to create, assess, and destroy resources created by a Terraform module. If this sounds like it would be difficult to set up robustly, that is because it is.</li> <li>Third Party Libraries: Third party tools like Gruntwork’s <a href="https://github.com/gruntwork-io/terratest" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">terratest</a> allow for defining tests of Terraform configuration using GoLang, which can help make building a “Custom Ephemeral Pipeline” easier. That being said, writing tests for HCL using GoLang requires a lot of context switching and is not the simplest process.</li> </ul> <a href="https://medium.com/@hello_9187/whats-new-in-terraform-1-6-testing-9d3fbf59f3a8">Website</a>