HashiCorp Terraform uses code to provision and manage any infrastructure. To help build out that code, HashiCorp has a Terraform Registry, where we, our community, and our tech partners publish providers and modules to share with all Terraform users.

Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise users can also use a private registry that serves as a one-stop-shop for sharing Terraform modules of all kinds with their teams. Team members can browse and search for modules that meet their needs and find or add reference info, a readme, and basic information about how to provision the module.

Now the private registry supports providers as well as modules. This new feature allows teams to centralize and distribute privately maintained providers, and it also brings several usability and security advantages to your organization’s use of public providers. This post will discuss these advantages in further detail.

»Terraform Providers

Terraform providers are the plugins that make it easy for Terraform to interact with all the services you need to run infrastructure successfully. Providers allow you to quickly and easily reuse resources and data sources from other tools and APIs that can be managed by Terraform. There are four kinds of providers:

1. Providers that we maintain (HashiCorp providers)
2. Providers our technology partners maintain (verified providers)
3. Providers our community members maintain (community providers)
4. And providers you or your teammates write for your company and share internally (private providers)

As of the end of March, 2022, we have more than 1,900 providers in the public registry. These providers enable fundamental infrastructure tools to be used easily with Terraform. In the public registry you can find providers for everything from authorization to VCS that make automating infrastructure provisioning easy.

»Terraform Private Registry with Providers

Terraform Cloud makes it easy to create repeatable patterns for infrastructure and share them with your entire team, speeding up adoption and reducing required support and maintenance.

The fastest way to speed up adoption is for your teams to be able to share a common set of reusable components, such as modules and providers. Today, you can host and distribute providers directly from your organization's private registry, just like modules. Meaning your team members can find both modules and providers to help them get started with Terraform. When your teams use the same modules and providers to build the same types of infrastructure, you have less to maintain and support.

Provider support in the private registry also allows you to build and host custom providers for your company and user needs. Critically, these can be easily found by your internal teams without needing to put them out in public. Anyone who is an org owner, or who has the permission to manage the private registry, can search for and save public providers or publish private providers for the whole organization to find and use in one interface.

With private providers, you can also declare your org's preferred version of a provider. Don't want anyone upgrading provider versions without approval? Now you have control over when a new version gets published.

Security teams will also be happy because provider support in the private registry means you can enforce the use of providers alongside modules using Sentinel policy as code. You can restrict providers or centers of distribution, so you can be sure only those providers vetted by security are allowed.

»Conclusion

We are so pleased to expand private registry support to all providers, and we hope you enjoy the changes. To learn more about Terraform, visit HashiCorp Learn, or visit our Terraform product page to get started.