Installing Terraform on WSL and Upgrading

This article shows you

How to install and upgrade Terraform on WSL2 (Ubuntu 20.04).

The Japanese version is on the blog of the company I work for.

Installing Terraform on WSL2

There are two ways to do this: using homebrew or downloading the binaries directly.

If you are using a Mac, you are probably familiar with homebrew.

Unlike apt, it does not require sudo.
(This time, I’ll leave the installation of homebrew itself to the official page.

In addition, you can use tfenv, which is a package manager for Terraform, or not.

Personally, I recommend using tfenv because Terraform updates quickly.

When not using tfenv

If you use homebrew, you only need the following command.

brew install terraform

If you want to download the binaries directly, do the following.

wget and unzip are required, if not, install them.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install wget unzip

Download the binary; the URL is different for each version, so check the official download page or release notes and change it accordingly.

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/1.0.4/terraform_1.0.4_linux_amd64.zip -O terraform.zip
unzip terraform.zip
sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin
rm terraform.zip

When using tfenv

If you use homebrew, you only need the following command.

brew install tfenv
tfenv install latest
tfenv use latest
terraform -v

If you want to download the binaries directly, do the following.

git clone https://github.com/tfutils/tfenv.git ~/.tfenv
sudo ln -s ~/.tfenv/bin/* /usr/local/bin
tfenv --version

tfenv install latest
tfenv use latest
terraform -v

In the above example, we put the symbolic sync in /usr/local/bin, but you can also add ~/.tfenv/bin to your PATH.

Upgrading Terraform in WSL2

When not using tfenv

You will need to manually download the latest binary again (if you are using homebrew, you can do a brew upgrade terraform).

When using tfenv

If you want to upgrade to the latest stable version, it is the same as during installation.

tfenv install latest
tfenv use latest
terraform -v

If you want to use the specified version, check the available versions.
To check an older version, you can use head -n 20 instead, or remove | head.

tfenv list-remote | head

Install the version you are looking for.

tfenv install 1.0.2
tfenv use 1.0.2
terraform -v

You can check the installed version as follows;

tfenv list

In closing

Have a happy Terraform life!