Installing Terraform in Windows Machine

Downloading Terraform binary

Go to https://www.terraform.io/downloads and choose between 386 or Amd64 that suits your machine. I will stick with 386 for the demo I got terraform_1.2.8_windows_386.zip at the time. This archive contain only one file, which is terraform.exe and we will extract it.

Extracting the binary to the program files folder

Let’s create a folder inside C:\Program Files (x86) named Terraform and extract the terraform_1.2.8_windows_386.zip inside the folder. If you downloaded the amd64 version, you can create it inside C:\Program Files instead.

Adding path for executable Terraform

Terraform isn’t available yet in the console because we aren’t adding the path yet for the executable binary. Press Windows key and search for Edit the system environment variables and click on it.

System properties windows will open. Click on Environment Variables, double click on Path variable to open Edit environment variable window, then add the path C:\Program Files (x86)\Terraform and save it

Now let’s test our installation.

Test the Terraform installation

Open Command Prompt or Powershell, try to check the terraform version to confirm the installation:

terraform -version

the result should be similar to this:

Terraform v1.2.8
on windows_386