How To Install Terraform on Linux Systems

This guide will walk you through the steps to install Terraform on Ubuntu / Debian / CentOS / Fedora / Arch Linux system. Terraform is a cloud-agnostic Infrastructure automation tool used to manage cloud and on-premise resources. With it you can build, change, and version infrastructure deployed on popular service providers.

Before downloading terraform we need to install wget and curl tools

# Debian / Ubuntu systems
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wget curl unzip

# RHEL based systems
sudo yum install curl wget unzip

How to Install Terraform on Linux

We shall consider two methods of performing the installation of Terraform on Linux systems.

Method 1: Install Terraform from upstream repository

Terraform developers maintains APT & YUM repositories for installing the latest releases pf Terraform.

Add repository and install Terraform using the commands below.

### Debian / Ubuntu ###
wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install terraform

### CentOS / RHEL ###
sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo
sudo yum -y install terraform

### Fedora ###
sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/fedora/hashicorp.repo
sudo dnf -y install terraform

### Amazon Linux ###
sudo yum install -y yum-utils shadow-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/AmazonLinux/hashicorp.repo
sudo yum -y install terraform

Method 2: Install Terraform on Linux from tarball

Terraform is also distributed as a tarball on Github. Check the latest release on Terraform releases page before downloading below.

TER_VER=`curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/hashicorp/terraform/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d: -f2 | tr -d \"\,\v | awk '{$1=$1};1'`
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/${TER_VER}/terraform_${TER_VER}_linux_amd64.zip

Once the archive is downloaded, extract and move terraform binary file to the /usr/local/bin directory.

$ unzip terraform_${TER_VER}_linux_amd64.zip
Archive:  terraform_xxx_linux_amd64.zip
 inflating: terraform

$ sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin/

This will make the tool accessible to all user accounts.

$ which terraform
/usr/local/bin/terraform

Check the version of Terraform installed

$ terraform --version
Terraform v1.6.4
on linux_amd64

To update Terraform on Linux, download the latest release and use the same process to extract and move binary file to location in your PATH.

Also check:

• How to Provision VMs on KVM with Terraform
• How To Provision VMs on oVirt / RHEV with Terraform
• Deploy VM Instances on Hetzner Cloud with Terraform
• Build AWS EC2 Machine Images (AMI) With Packer and Ansible