Local overrides for Terraform providers

A couple of days ago I had the need to debug a Terraform provider. After some digging around I learnt that you can define local overrides in a Terraform confirmation where you tell it to search for provider binaries in a local directory without requiring any checksums.

In this particular case I wanted to check an execution path in the GitHub provider and so I added some debug statements, built it, and then I wanted to use it in a test project. Terraform allows that by defining custom provider installation paths to to a global configuration file called .terraformrc:

provider_installation {
  dev_overrides {
    "integrations/github" = "/Users/zerok/src/github.com/integrations/terraform-providers-github"
  }

  direct {}
}

I don’t want to have that globally defined, but only for that particular test project. Locally, there is also the option to define a different file using the TF_CLI_CONFIG_FILE environment variable

export TF_CLI_CONFIG_FILE=/Users/zerok/testproject/dev.tfrc

When I then run terraform plan in the test project, it will print a warning that a local override is active and then use my locally compiled provider.