The Simplest Terraform with Docker on macOS

If you'd like to experiment with Terraform on macOS locally, a great provider for doing so is the Docker provider. You can get set up in a few simple steps, like so:

1. Install Docker

Install Docker for Mac if you have not already.

2. Install Terraform

Grab the latest Terraform binary for Darwin/macOS from releases.hashicorp.com and place the terraform binary somewhere in your PATH.

You can install also install Terraform with Homebrew like this:

brew install terraform

3. Configure, Initialize, Plan & Apply!

Start with a basic NGINX Docker container definition in a minimal Terraform configuration — create a main.tf file with this command:

cat > main.tf << EOF
# Configure Docker provider and connect to the local Docker socket
provider "docker" {
  host = "unix:///var/run/docker.sock"
}

# Create NGINX container
resource "docker_container" "nginx" {
  image = "\${docker_image.nginx.latest}"
  name  = "enginecks"
  ports {
    internal = 80
    external = 80
  }
}

resource "docker_image" "nginx" {
  name = "nginx:latest"
}
EOF

Initialize Terraform:

terraform init

Generate Plan

Now, if the output from terraform init was without error, generate the plan:

terraform plan

Apply Plan

Finally, if the plan is all good and without error, apply it:

terraform apply -auto-approve

The apply should complete without error and if so, you can move on to verifying the container status.

Verify Container Status

Verify that the container is running:

docker ps -f name=enginecks --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}"

The output should have something like this:

NAMES               STATUS
enginecks           Up 17 seconds

Looks like the NGINX container (named enginecks) is up!

Now visit http://localhost in your browser and you should observe the default Welcome to nginx! default page.

brianshumate/docker-macos-terraform.md