How to Provision Cloud Servers with Terraform

Terraform lets you define cloud infrastructure as code — provision servers, configure DNS and manage resources declaratively.

Install Terraform

wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install terraform -y

Hetzner Configuration

resource "hcloud_server" "web" {
  name        = "web-server-1"
  image       = "ubuntu-24.04"
  server_type = "cx21"
  location    = "nbg1"
  ssh_keys    = [hcloud_ssh_key.default.id]
}

Deploy

export TF_VAR_hcloud_token="your-token"
terraform init && terraform plan && terraform apply

Conclusion

Terraform makes infrastructure reproducible. Our team provisions cloud infrastructure using Terraform for repeatable server deployments.