Question

A DevOps engineer is writing a configuration to launch an EC2 instance and needs to install and start a web server when the instance boots. A teammate suggests using a remote-exec provisioner with an SSH connection block to run the installation commands. According to HashiCorp's guidance, what is the recommended approach in this situation?

Accepted Answer

Avoid the provisioner and instead pass the installation commands through the instance's user_data / cloud-init mechanism, treating provisioners as a last resort

Answer

Use the remote-exec provisioner because provisioners are the standard, recommended way to configure software on instances

Answer

Use a local-exec provisioner instead, since local-exec is the officially preferred provisioner type over remote-exec

Answer

Add a depends_on to the provisioner block so Terraform runs the commands only after all other resources are created