As you can see, the basic set of providers listed above takes around 100MB – not much for today standards, but still. If you have multiple Terraform working directories, you have to download and store your providers for every one of them. However, this approach has also a drawback. This approach is nice, as all your projects are independent and self-contained: you can copy the whole directory to some other place or even machine and everything will still work. rwxr-xr-x 1 piontec piontec 12M Apr 19 07:29 terraform-provider-template_v1.0.0_x4 rwxr-xr-x 1 piontec piontec 12M Apr 19 07:29 terraform-provider-null_v1.0.0_x4 rwxr-xr-x 1 piontec piontec 71M May 24 06:28 terraform-provider-aws_v1.20.0_x4 rwxrwxr-x 1 piontec piontec 239 May 24 06:28 lock.json There you can find the downloaded providers: ll -h. But where does Terraform keep these additional provider binaries? Well, each directory that is used as a root of Terraform project (where you run “terraform init”) has a hidden “.terraform” directory.

You can find a list of projects developing these providers on Github.

In the example above, we have 3 providers being used: the “null” and “template” provider and a specialized provider for talking with AWS API. So, for example, when you’re using AWS as an infrastructure provider, and you also use some templating to generate config files, you might run “terraform version” and see something like this: $ terraform version Have you noticed, that when you run “terraform init”, Terraform fetches additional binaries from the Internet? These binaries are called “dynamic providers” and they are (mainly) interfaces to the infrastructure operators you’re using in your Terraform code. This allows to cache Terraform providers.

Set “TF_PLUGIN_CACHE_DIR” environment variable to an empty dir, then rerun “terraform init” to switch to a shared providers directory.

Terraform plugins