Building from Source

Pre-built binaries are available for download for a variety of supported platforms through the HashiCorp Releases website.

However, if you'd like to build Terraform yourself, you can do so using the Go build toolchain and the options specified in this document.

Prerequisites

1. Ensure you've installed the Go language version specified in .go-version.
2. Clone this repository to a location of your choice.

Terraform Build Options

Terraform accepts certain options passed using ldflags at build time which control the behavior of the resulting binary.

Dev Version Reporting

Terraform will include a -dev flag when reporting its own version (ex: 1.5.0-dev) unless version.dev is set to no:

go build -ldflags "-w -s -X 'github.com/hashicorp/terraform/version.dev=no'" -o bin/ .

Experimental Features

Experimental features of Terraform will be disabled unless main.experimentsAllowed is set to yes:

go build -ldflags "-w -s -X 'main.experimentsAllowed=yes'" -o bin/ .

In the official build process for Terraform, experiments are only allowed in alpha release builds. We recommend that third-party distributors follow that convention in order to reduce user confusion.

Go Options

For the most part, the Terraform release process relies on the Go toolchain defaults for the target operating system and processor architecture.

CGO_ENABLED

One exception is the CGO_ENABLED option, which is set explicitly when building Terraform binaries. For most platforms, we build with CGO_ENABLED=0 in order to produce a statically linked binary. For MacOS/Darwin operating systems, we build with CGO_ENABLED=1 to avoid a platform-specific issue with DNS resolution.