Terraform Pull Request Automation using Github Actions

Terraform is a widely used tool for infrastructure automation, facilitating the management of complex deployments across multiple cloud providers. However, manually managing infrastructure as code with Terraform can be cumbersome and time-intensive, prompting many teams to automate the process using Git-based workflows and tools like GitHub Actions. This blog post explores how to automate Terraform pull requests with GitHub Actions, which is a CI/CD tool that allows for the automation of workflows in GitHub repositories through custom YAML files. The process involves creating a workflow that checks out the pull request branch, initializes Terraform, plans the changes, comments on the pull request with the plan, validates the configuration syntax, and applies the changes. Specifically, it outlines the use of GitHub Actions steps including actions/checkout for branch checkout, hashicorp/setup-terraform for initializing Terraform, and hashicorp/terraform-action for planning Terraform changes, demonstrating how these integrations can streamline infrastructure management tasks.