Working with Terraform Resources

Understanding Terraform Resources

A resource in Terraform represents a component of your infrastructure, such as a physical server, a virtual machine, a DNS record, or an S3 bucket. Resources have attributes that define their properties and behaviors, such as the size and location of a virtual machine or the domain name of a DNS record.

When you define a resource in Terraform, you specify the type of resource, a unique name for the resource, and the attributes that define the resource. Terraform uses the resource block to define resources in your Terraform configuration.

Task 1: Create a security group

To allow traffic to the EC2 instance, you need to create a security group. Follow these steps:

In your main.tf file, add the following code to create a security group:

resource "aws_security_group" "web_server" {
  name_prefix = "web-server-sg"

  ingress {
    from_port   = 80
    to_port     = 80
    protocol    = "tcp"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }
}

Run terraform init to initialize the Terraform project.

Run terraform apply to create the security group.

Verify the newly created security group

Task 2: Create an EC2 instance

Now you can create an EC2 instance with Terraform. Follow these steps:
In your main.tf file add the following code to create an EC2 instance:

resource "aws_instance" "web_server" {
  ami           = "ami-0c7217cdde317cfec"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  key_name      = "TerraformKeypair"
  security_groups = [
    aws_security_group.web_server.name
  ]
  user_data = <<-EOF
              #!/bin/bash
              echo "<html><body><h1>Welcome to my website!</h1></body></html>" > index.html
              nohup python3 -m http.server 80 &
              EOF
}

Note: Replace the ami and key_name values with your own. You can find a list of available AMIs in the AWS documentation.

Note: Python3 is used here

Run terraform apply to create the EC2 instance.

Task 3: Access your website

Now that your EC2 instance is up and running, you can access the website you just hosted on it.

Open a web browser and navigate to the public IP address of your instance to view the webpage.

Thank you.