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

Terraform is 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 v1.2.3
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.