I’ve been using Terraform quite extensively at work for some time and, over time, I’ve been interacting with more and more modules. At the same time, I need to work with a rather small HDD for modern standards where every GB counts.
Terraform’s default configuration wastes a lot of space by keeping a separate
copy of the provider binary in each .terraform/plugins. In my case that was
about 20 GB.
$ find . -name .terraform -exec echo {}/plugins \; | xargs du -hs --total
19G
However, you can configure Terraform CLI to use a centalized cache directory as
long as your OS supports hardlinks. To do so, create ~/.terraformrc with
contents plugin_cache_dir = "$HOME/Library/Caches/terraform/plugin-cache" or
some other directory that makes more sense to you. Read more about
this configuration.
After that, you can take advantage of the consolidated cache.
$ mkdir -p ~/Library/Caches/terraform/plugin-cache
$ find . -name .terraform -exec rm -r {}/plugins \;
$ ...some terraform inits...
$ du -hs ~/Library/Caches/terraform/plugin-cache
819M
On top of saved space you will have faster terraform inits.