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I'm hoping there is something to pick up when I have misspelled variables and comments to save me some time when I'm checking my code and reduce the potential for any errors.

I normally use IntelliJ IDE for Terraform on a MAC but also have VS code set up that I can use.

Is there a plugin for either I could use or even a different tool? I imaging variable might be difficult to lint due as I use underscores to separate words in my variable names so the tool would need to know to treat underscores as white space for linting purposes.

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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terraform fmt

The terraform fmt command is used to rewrite Terraform configuration files to a canonical format and style.

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    I already use that.
    – doug
    Commented Dec 6, 2020 at 21:34
  • Thanks anyway though. I'm after something to spell check for me. I use terraform fmt to formate run terraform plan to check it should run. But for spelling, I currently do git compare with branch then look through each bit I changed and copy all my comments and variable names I'm not 100% sure about to word and change any seportors for spaces then see if anything gets highlighted. It's just really not a time-efficient process for that part of it.
    – doug
    Commented Dec 6, 2020 at 21:46
  • @doug it might be easier using an IDE that has spell check (or a plugin thereof).
    – mikequentel
    Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 21:00
  • The issue I had when I last tried that in VS code was the spell check plugin I used thought all the resources were misspelled as it couldn't pick out words separated by underscores. So I need it to treat - . and _ as if they were spaces so it can tell if the words separated by them are spelled correctly.
    – doug
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 8:06
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    Sorry but this is not linting, this is putting something in canonical format as stated but it is not a linter
    – krystan honour
    Commented Jul 13, 2021 at 10:39
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The tools that we have include in our Terraform pipelines to check code quality and best practises are;

  1. Tflint
  2. TFSec
  3. Checkov

This way any issues get highlighted early at the MR stage.

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    this is the correct answer
    – krystan honour
    Commented Jul 13, 2021 at 10:39
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    you can also hook all these up with pre-commit, which is a really nice way to check a commit each time :)
    – krystan honour
    Commented Jul 13, 2021 at 10:41
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VSCode has a Terraform Linter "l2fprod.terraform-fork" Have NOT tried it. Did a simple search terra + lint. HTH DrewBai

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You can use tflint project. It has lot of plugins for cloud providers. https://github.com/terraform-linters/tflint

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To go further and actually show what the change will do, after using linting as an initial gate (as other answers have mentioned how to do), I found what worked well as a quality gate was to perform a terraform plan (on a particular workspace that had the latest resources) without locking the state, e.g, using -lock=false. This tested that what an actual pull request would actually change and would not fail if there is a syntax error but also show to myself and whoever is reviewing the PR what the change would result in.

I also found if you want to lint a whole group of terraform workspaces a helpful tool is terragrunt. Running terragrunt run-all validate could validate all the workspaces that had a terragrunt.hcl file in it in 1 command.

I used this even before I passed my pull request onto others, creating a pull request early, pushing the code and let the pipeline validate things in the background while I'm also checking I have the best I could do at the same time.

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