Development Environment Setup

Requirements

• Terraform 0.12.26+ (to run acceptance tests)
• Go 1.23+ (to build the provider plugin)
• Mac, Linux or WSL (to build the provider plugin)

Quick Start

If you wish to work on the provider, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (please check the requirements before proceeding).

Note

This project uses Go Modules making it safe to work with it outside of your existing GOPATH. The instructions that follow assume a directory in your home directory outside of the standard GOPATH (i.e $HOME/development/hashicorp/).

Begin by creating a new development directory and cloning the repository.

mkdir -p $HOME/development/hashicorp/; cd $HOME/development/hashicorp/

 git clone git@github.com:hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws

Enter the provider directory and run make tools. This will install the tools for provider development.

make tools

Building the Provider

To compile the provider, run make build.

make build

This will build the provider and put the provider binary in the $GOPATH/bin directory.

ls -la $GOPATH/bin/terraform-provider-aws

Testing the Provider

In order to test the provider, you can run make test.

Tip

Make sure no AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID or AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY variables are set, and there's no [default] section in the AWS credentials file ~/.aws/credentials.

make test

In order to run the full suite of acceptance tests, run make testacc.

Warning

Acceptance tests create real resources, and often cost money to run. Please read Running and Writing Acceptance Tests before running these tests.

make testacc

Using the Provider

With Terraform v0.14 and later, development overrides for provider developers can be leveraged in order to use the provider built from source.

To do this, populate a Terraform CLI configuration file (~/.terraformrc for all platforms other than Windows; terraform.rc in the %APPDATA% directory when using Windows) with at least the following options:

provider_installation {
  dev_overrides {
    "hashicorp/aws" = "[REPLACE WITH GOPATH]/bin"
  }
  direct {}
}