Using Terraform Plugin Cache

In my current project, we have automation scripts running terraform which have multiple providers like gcp & vault.

• Also as part of automation we have to cleanup the repo which has the default .terraform dir (where all providers were downloaded) as we cloned the git repo(very light) on every run to fetch latest repo .
• Due to this cleanup , everytime automation was downloading the terraform plugins/providers which would take some time depending on download speeds.

We wanted to avoid downloading same plugins/providers every time if there was no change in version.
Then i found out about terraform Provider Plugin Cache . You can configure this via environment variable TF_PLUGIN_CACHE_DIR.

Added below 3 lines for the cache to work in the automation bash script:

TF_CACHE_PATH="$HOME/.terraform.d/plugin-cache"
export TF_PLUGIN_CACHE_DIR=$TF_CACHE_PATH
mkdir -p $TF_CACHE_PATH

Logs without cache:

Initializing the backend...
Initializing provider plugins...
- Finding hashicorp/google versions matching "3.51.0"...
- Finding latest version of hashicorp/vault...
- Installing hashicorp/google v3.51.0...
- Installed hashicorp/google v3.51.0 (signed by HashiCorp)
- Installing hashicorp/vault v2.19.1...
- Installed hashicorp/vault v2.19.1 (signed by HashiCorp)

Logs with cache hit:

Initializing the backend...
Initializing provider plugins...
- Finding hashicorp/google versions matching "3.51.0"...
- Finding latest version of hashicorp/vault...
- Using hashicorp/vault v2.19.1 from the shared cache directory
- Using hashicorp/google v3.51.0 from the shared cache directory

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