Automated Documentation Generation for Terraform Modules with terraform-docs

Ensuring our Terraform modules are well-documented is a key part of our development process. But, let’s be honest, keeping docs up-to-date is a tedious task! Luckily, there’s an efficient tool out there that makes the process simpler and quicker – terraform-docs!

Terraform-docs is an open-source, cross-platform tool, that can automatically generate comprehensive documentation for your Terraform modules. Sounds great, right? The most exciting part is it can generate your docs in multiple formats including markdown, JSON, XML, YAML, or pretty text format!

Here’s how to get started on a Mac:

1. Installation:

brew install terraform-docs

2. Verify your installation:

terraform-docs --version

3. Run terraform-docs in your module directory:

terraform-docs markdown ./path_to_your_module > README.md

4. The result should be something like this:

5. Enjoy your automatically generated, up-to-date module documentation!

An important highlight of this tool is its ability to integrate with automated processes! You can set up a pre-commit Git Hook to trigger terraform-docs to update your docs every time you commit your code. Now that’s what I call smart documentation!

Happy coding and remember, code that isn’t documented, doesn’t exist! 😉

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Source: https://github.com/segmentio/terraform-docs