Initialization

The initialization step allows Terraform to do the following:

• Initialize the Terraform context to check and make the connection between the Terraform provider and remote service—in our case, with Azure.
• Download the plugin(s) of the provider(s)—in our case, it will be the azurerm provider.
• Check the code variables.

To execute the initialization, run the init command:

terraform init

The following is a screenshot of terraform init:

As can be seen during its execution of the preceding command, Terraform does the following:

• It downloads the latest version of the azurerm plugin.
• It creates a working .terraform directory.

The following is a screenshot of the .terraform directory:

Once the initialization step is done, we can proceed to the next step, which is previewing the changes.