tflookup – Developer Diary Part 1

Dear Diary!

As a DevOps engineer (or SRE as the cool people call it) I’m working closely together with Terraform which is one more great open source based application from Hashicorp and allows to define an infrastructure in text files (read: „Infrastructure as code“)

Terraform has a great and extensive documentation, especially for the things you can do with the various available providers.

So, after understanding the basic hows and whats about Terraform and its DSL, I spend most of my time clicking my way through the Terraform documentation to reach the part of the specific resource or datasource I want to know the parameters for.

That is tedious.

I tried optimizing that, but that still wasn’t fast enough.

I needed a quick lookup. An input field, I could jot a few keywords into and it would quickly guide me through to the right documentation page.

But hey, I’m a developer. I know my way around REST, web UIs and stuff, so this couldn’t be that hard, right?

Narrator: „He was wrong“

So, my little diary. I will embark on a journey now that will bring me what I deserve the most. A lookup feature. For Terraform. I think, I will call it tflookup!

Yours,
Dennis

This post is one of five posts from the tflookup developer diary series

Cover Image: „diary writing“ by Fredrik Rubensson

Originally published to dev.to