DEV Community

Nathan Ferguson
Nathan Ferguson

Posted on

PATHing out

#terraform #shell #aws

So I'm still getting back into things when it comes to CLI, and more importantly, terraform. I'm gonna break down the steps I was doing to get this working.

Previously I installed Terraform on my machine using Homebrew:

# Install Homebrew if you don't have it
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

# Install Terraform
brew install terraform

# Verify installation
terraform version
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This worked fine, however later when I went to use the terraform command, it gave me the dreaded:
command not found: terraform.

Checking further, it seems that this is only stored in $PATH temporarily. I discovered this is what's happening when you try to use a command like terraform:

  1. Your shell looks at the PATH variable
  2. It searches each directory in PATH (from left to right)
  3. It looks for a file named terraform that's executable
  4. Once found, it runs that program
  5. If not found in any PATH directory → "command not found" error

I then used the following to verify that terraform was indeed installed:
find / -name terraform 2>/dev/null

I was able to then verify it was at /opt/homebrew/bin/terraform. The issue is that /opt/homebrew/bin isn't in my PATH.

I needed to add this to PATH, which I did via this command:
echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

I then tried to restart using
source ~/.zshrc but I was getting another error! This time it was command not found: compdef. After some additional research, I discovered this happens when there's an issue with zsh completion system or when completion scripts are being loaded before zsh is fully initialized.

To fix, I ran these commands:

# Create a backup first
cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.backup

# Add the lines to the beginning
echo -e "autoload -Uz compinit\ncompinit\n$(cat ~/.zshrc)" > ~/.zshrc.tmp
mv ~/.zshrc.tmp ~/.zshrc

# Reload
source ~/.zshrc
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I then was able to use source ~/.zshrc which reloads the console.

After all this, since the terraform location it was added successfully to PATH, I was able to confirm terraform was working:

terraform version
Terraform v1.12.2
on darwin_arm64

Next steps are to start playing around with Terraform!

Top comments (0)