What is Terraform Developer Portal?

Application teams often wait on platform teams to provision infrastructure, and each team ends up building it differently. Terraform Developer Portal is an internal developer platform in HCP Terraform that lets platform engineers publish approved templates and add-ons, so application developers can deploy applications and their supporting infrastructure through self-service.

Note

This feature is currently in public beta. Do not use beta functionality in production environments.

We encourage you to share your feedback with us on the beta.

Hands-on: Try the Get Started with Terraform Developer Portal collection to create a template and add-on definitions, deploy a sample application and its supporting infrastructure, then invoke an action.

How does Terraform Developer Portal work?

Terraform Developer Portal uses HCP Terraform no-code modules to standardize infrastructure and application deployments. Platform engineers define templates and add-on definitions, and application developers use them to deploy applications and supporting infrastructure.

There are several key workflows for Terraform Developer Portal:

Create templates and add-on definitions: Platform engineers create shared template and add-on definitions for applications and their infrastructure. Both templates and add-ons deploy Terraform no-code modules.
Templates give application developers a starting point and can create the main infrastructure for an application. For example, a template can create a code repository with your organization's standard libraries and best practices. Platform engineers typically manage templates.
Add-ons package reusable infrastructure configurations that application developers can install on top of their applications, such as a database or a cache.
Shared templates and add-on definitions can reflect requirements from security, compliance, and finance teams. Refer to Create and manage templates and Create and manage add-on definitions for more information.
Deploy applications and install add-ons: Application developers use templates and add-ons to deploy applications and install supporting infrastructure. Refer to Use a template to deploy and manage an application and Use an add-on to deploy supporting infrastructure for more information.
Invoke actions: Platform engineers can define Terraform actions in the no-code modules that back templates and add-ons. Application developers can invoke these actions to maintain infrastructure, such as invalidating a cache or restarting a virtual machine. Refer to the action block reference and Invoke actions for more information.