Terraform CLI Args, define once, use again and again

I regularly use *terraform plan -no-color* command to check the plan in a more readable way. I wrote a blog post regarding the same here. Give it a read if you haven’t already.

Running this command every time is quite cumbersome. Hence I was looking for options and came across these terraform environment variables features.

I can export TF_CLI_ARGS as shown below with the arg.

export TF_CLI_ARGS="-no-color"

Now, If I run terraform plan it will be equivalent of terraform plan -no-color

but If I run terraform apply it starts to fail as -no-color is not a valid arg for terraform apply.

To solve this problem, we can also mention command-specific args, such as TF_CLI_ARGS_plan or TF_CLI_ARGS_apply , In my case, as shown below,

export TF_CLI_ARGS_plan="-no-color"

I added the above statement in my bashrc, and life is a little easier with terraform now.

I hope you learned something new from this blog post. Click here to learn about me and how you can support my work, Thank you.