The term "naming conventions" is a common yet important aspect of increasing the readability and clarity of your Terraform files. When you opt for naming conventions, you either want to maintain and scale your infrastructure, or you want your team to become more productive by efficiently collaborating and managing your infrastructure-as-code projects.With time, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the Terraform variables, resources, and modules. That's when creating a proper naming convention becomes crucial so that you and your team members can work on the same page without any complexity and uncertainty.But before we discuss the general best practices for Terraform naming conventions, let's first understand the term naming convention a bit more.What is Naming Convention & Why it matters in TerraformA convention is a systematic approach to naming resources, variables, and modules within your infrastructure-as-code projects. It encompasses a structured set of rules that bridges the gap between you and your team members to discover each resource's purpose and interconnections.Also, this convention allows you to fix the error diagnosis process more efficiently and quickly integrate new team members. In the evolving scenario of infrastructure-as-code (IAC) projects, having a naming convention for Terraform files becomes more critical than ever. It shapes project conception, development, and maintenance fundamentals as a cornerstone.The pivotal role of naming convention is based on three fundamental traits:Readability: A clear naming convention helps you easily understand and navigate your resources and code, simplifying troubleshooting.Maintainability: Using consistent names ensures your project remains easy to manage and adaptable, even when team members change.Collaboration: A shared naming convention facilitates teamwork and ensures that even non-technical stakeholders can understand your code.General Naming ConventionsLowercaseYou should keep the naming convention for all resources, variables, and modules in lowercase. By using lowercase or capslock, you can execute naming for your resources, variables, and modules in your configurations. Also, it's recommended for you to use something other than camelCase or PascalCase.Special CharactersIt's common practice to use underscores when naming resources and variables in Terraform because the platform already uses them to separate resource names. To avoid issues, avoid special characters like `!@#$%^&*()` in your naming conventions, especially for cloud provider resources. Adding characters like dots to names could lead to unexpected behavior and complicate managing things.AbbreviationsYou need to focus on this critical part when working on projects. Due to its unclear nature, which can lead to confusion, you should avoid using odd abbreviations in your naming convention. Let's say you use vn as an abbreviation for the virtual network, which seems unclear, so why would you use this to increase complexities in naming your projects?However, if you want to use abbreviations for the above case, you can look for standard abbreviations like vnet. Remember to use the most common ones, which should also be applicable.Project and Module NamingYou can use the following naming convention for project naming:<project-name>-<provider>-<environment>The naming scheme is based on the criteria that Terraform requires for publishing a module to the official Terraform registry:Your project name should not contain any special characters; it should be unique.The provider name should reflect the primary provider you're provisioning to, allowing you to prepare your projects for potential multi-cloud deployments right from the start.The environment name should correspond to the environment you're deploying to, whether a standard dev, test, or prod approach or a more specific naming convention like a customer ID, department, or another relevant identifier.Module naming conventions should reflect the module's purpose. It means module names should clearly state what the module is designed to do or manage so that you can quickly comprehend the infrastructure layout. Example: module "azure_app_service" {...} for a module managing Azure App Services.Also, use concise and descriptive names for module naming conventions. This means you must be concise while being descriptive and refrain from using long or complex names that are difficult to read or understand. Example: module "dns_config"Variable NamingConsistent naming for your variable is necessary to avoid confusion for you and your possible module user. Here are some consistent naming conventions for variables:Common VariablesYou'll use these variables to define the name of a resource group, location, or prefix you're referencing in your data.tf files. You can consider the following naming convention for these variables:<provider>_<resource>_<purpose> or: az_rg_name (for a pre-existing Azure resource group name)Input and Output VariablesYou'll use these variables to connect modules, and they're applied directly. It's recommended that you use the following naming convention for these variables:<SERVICE-NAME>_<resource>_<purpose> or: AML_subnet_name (A Subnet name used for the Azure ML services (e.g., compute instances); Note the Case sensitivity)You can use output variables for informational purposes or to link modules together. It's helpful to include the module name to clarify which module the output variable comes from. Here's the naming convention you can use for output variables:<MODULE>_<SERVICE-NAME>_<resource>_<purpose> or: EZBASTION_AML_subnet_id (The Subnet ID of a compute instance in Azure ML Studio; Note the Case sensitivity) Wrapping UpSo yes, adopting consistent naming conventions is a game-changer for maintaining and scaling your infrastructure. By implementing a clear strategy for naming your Terraform files, modules, resources, and variables, you're setting yourself and your team up for success. This structure helps keep your codebase organized, directly boosting productivity across the board—especially when collaborating with others on infrastructure-as-code projects.Clear names in your code make it more readable and enhance its maintainability. When everyone on your team can easily understand what each component does at a glance, it reduces confusion and smoother the development process. This clarity makes onboarding new team members more manageable and ensures that your infrastructure is future-proof and can scale efficiently as your needs grow.Read Morehttps://devopsden.io/article/use-of-dynos-in-herokuFollow us onhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/devopsden/
