During which Terraform phase are providers installed?

During which Terraform phase are providers installed?

• A. Init
• B. Plan
• C. Refresh
• D. All of the above

Answer: (A)

Providers are Terraform plugins that must be downloaded and prepared before Terraform can do anything with them. This happens during the initialization phase: running terraform init makes Terraform read your configuration, resolve the provider requirements, download the correct provider binaries, and initialize them so they’re ready for use. After that, plan uses the already-installed providers to compute changes, and refresh updates the state by querying real resources—neither of those steps installs providers. So the initialization phase is the moment providers are installed.

Providers are Terraform plugins that must be downloaded and prepared before Terraform can do anything with them. This happens during the initialization phase: running terraform init makes Terraform read your configuration, resolve the provider requirements, download the correct provider binaries, and initialize them so they’re ready for use. After that, plan uses the already-installed providers to compute changes, and refresh updates the state by querying real resources—neither of those steps installs providers. So the initialization phase is the moment providers are installed.