How to use init with modules and subfolder structure

Terraform
1

Hey Terraform community,

As I’m new to terraform and we are still figuring out how to structure our infrastructure code, there is a question i didn’t find an answer to.

We are using the following directory structure for our code:

environment
—test
-----subgroup(describes part of Test stage)
--------terraform.tfvars (declaring values to use in modules)
--------terraform.tf (referencing our modules)
—prod
-----subgroup
-------…
modules
—modulename
-----modulename.tf
-----input.tf (for variable definition)
-----output.tf (output definition

All of this is planned to use a remote state in an Azure Storage Account.

Our question is: where and how do we use “terraform init” in this setup. Because my understanding was, that its run once in a directory where the terraform.tf file is (like in the environments subdirectories).

Is there any other way to not initialize each subdirectory for using our modules? Or did i got the whole structure wrong?

Greetings Fabian

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2

Hello @fajanssen,

You are correct! In your setup, you will need to run terraform init in each working subdirectory (i.e., cd environment/test/subgroup && terraform init) . The structure you outlined is a common pattern for Terraform VCS repository structure.

There’s a Github thread with a useful discussion on this, as it’s a commonly cited point of friction. We’ll likely revisit it in the future!

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