Org-mode and Terraform

Thomas Dickson

1 minute read



I’m using org-mode to generate the documentation and code to describe and define my project infrastructure. As there are a few different moving parts associated with the things I build I need to be able to get up to scratch with what I’m doing in a few minutes - I can’t afford to lose track of what I’ve done, when.

This post is about how I’m using Literate programming 1 and Infrastructure as Code 2 to support my hobby projects. Here’s a quick diagram of how I’m using a single org-mode file is able to generate documentation and source code:

graph TD A[Org mode file]-->B[Documentation] A-->C[fa:fa-ban Source code];

I’m using Terraform as the IaC tool to manage my infrastructure. To be able to create terraform files from org-mode I’ve:

  1. Added the Terraform emacs package to my init.org file.
  2. Created a template org-mode file that saves all terraform code blocks to a specified terraform file on command.

Note that the Terraform major mode package doesn’t support the ability for org-babel to compile and run code blocks within org-mode. This is fine as I’d rather be able to generate a file(s) and run terraform apply to build my infrastructure in a single step.

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  1. Literate programming is a programming paradigm that combines natural language and source code in a single file to define a program. Or something like that. ↩

  2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of using files (code) to define what servers (infrastructure) are used to run applications. I hate using the same words in the definition of a term, so here is an entire website about it. I’m using Terraform as my IaC tool. ↩