Terraform Tutorial — Providers Practice Exercises

2 minute read

Test your understanding of provider configuration, versioning, and aliases.

Exercise 1: required_providers

Task: Write a terraform {} block that requires the AWS provider from HashiCorp with a version constraint that allows any 5.x release, and requires Terraform CLI version 1.7.0 or higher.

Answer 
terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.7.0"

  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.0"
    }
  }
}

Exercise 2: Version Constraints

Task: What versions would each constraint allow? Write the range for each.

  1. version = "~> 5.31.0"
  2. version = "~> 5.0"
  3. version = ">= 5.0.0, < 6.0.0"
  4. version = "= 5.31.0"
Answer
  1. ~> 5.31.0 → >= 5.31.0, < 5.32.0 (patch versions only: 5.31.0, 5.31.1, 5.31.2, …)
  2. ~> 5.0 → >= 5.0.0, < 6.0.0 (any 5.x version)
  3. >= 5.0.0, < 6.0.0 → Same as #2 — any 5.x version
  4. = 5.31.0 → Only version 5.31.0

Exercise 3: Multi-Region Setup

Task: Write provider configurations for AWS in us-east-1 (default) and ap-southeast-1 (aliased as aws.singapore). Then write two aws_s3_bucket resources — one in each region.

Answer 
provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

provider "aws" {
  alias  = "singapore"
  region = "ap-southeast-1"
}

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "us_data" {
  bucket = "myapp-us-data"
}

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "sg_data" {
  provider = aws.singapore
  bucket   = "myapp-sg-data"
}

Exercise 4: Default Tags

Task: Configure the AWS provider with default tags so that every resource gets ManagedBy = "terraform" and Project = "web-app" tags without specifying them on each resource.

Answer 
provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"

  default_tags {
    tags = {
      ManagedBy = "terraform"
      Project   = "web-app"
    }
  }
}

Exercise 5: Provider Discovery

Task: You want to manage GitHub repositories and Cloudflare DNS records alongside your AWS infrastructure. Write the required_providers block with all three providers.

Answer 
terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.0"
    }
    github = {
      source  = "integrations/github"
      version = "~> 6.0"
    }
    cloudflare = {
      source  = "cloudflare/cloudflare"
      version = "~> 4.0"
    }
  }
}

Note: The GitHub provider is published under integrations/github, not hashicorp/github.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you learned:

  • A provider is a plugin that connects Terraform to a specific platform’s API
  • The required_providers block declares which providers you need, their source, and version constraints
  • The ~> operator is the most common version constraint — it allows minor/patch upgrades
  • The .terraform.lock.hcl file pins exact versions for reproducibility
  • Provider aliases let you use multiple configurations of the same provider (multi-region, multi-account)
  • Default tags save repetition across all resources

Next up: Resources — defining infrastructure in code.

← Multiple Providers & Aliases Resources →

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