---
layout: "extend"
page_title: "Plugin Basics"
sidebar_current: "docs-plugins-basics"
description: |-
  This page documents the basics of how the plugin system in Terraform works, and how to setup a basic development environment for plugin development if you're writing a Terraform plugin.
---

# Plugin Basics

~> **Advanced topic!** Plugin development is a highly advanced
topic in Terraform, and is not required knowledge for day-to-day usage.
If you don't plan on writing any plugins, this section of the documentation is
not necessary to read. For general use of Terraform, please see
[Intro to Terraform](/intro/index.html) or the
[Terraform: Get Started](https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/terraform/aws-get-started?utm_source=WEBSITE&utm_medium=WEB_IO&utm_offer=ARTICLE_PAGE&utm_content=DOCS)
collection on HashiCorp Learn.

This page documents the basics of how the plugin system in Terraform
works, and how to setup a basic development environment for plugin development
if you're writing a Terraform plugin.

## How it Works

Terraform providers and provisioners are provided via plugins. Each plugin
exposes an implementation for a specific service, such as AWS, or provisioner,
such as bash. Plugins are executed as a separate process and communicate with
the main Terraform binary over an RPC interface.

The code within the binaries must adhere to certain interfaces.
The network communication and RPC is handled automatically by higher-level
Terraform libraries. The exact interface to implement is documented
in its respective documentation section.

## Installing Plugins

The [provider plugins distributed by HashiCorp](/docs/providers/index.html) are
automatically installed by `terraform init`. Third-party plugins (both
providers and provisioners) can be manually installed into the user plugins
directory, located at `%APPDATA%\terraform.d\plugins` on Windows and
`~/.terraform.d/plugins` on other systems.

For more information, see:

- [Configuring Providers](/docs/configuration/providers.html)
- [Configuring Providers: Third-party Plugins](/docs/configuration/providers.html#third-party-plugins)

For developer-centric documentation, see:

- [How Terraform Works: Plugin Discovery](/docs/extend/how-terraform-works.html#discovery)

## Developing a Plugin

Developing a plugin is simple. The only knowledge necessary to write
a plugin is basic command-line skills and basic knowledge of the
[Go programming language](http://golang.org).

-> **Note:** A common pitfall is not properly setting up a
<code>$GOPATH</code>. This can lead to strange errors. You can read more about
this [here](https://golang.org/doc/code.html) to familiarize
yourself.

Create a new Go project somewhere in your `$GOPATH`. If you're a
GitHub user, we recommend creating the project in the directory
`$GOPATH/src/github.com/USERNAME/terraform-NAME`, where `USERNAME`
is your GitHub username and `NAME` is the name of the plugin you're
developing. This structure is what Go expects and simplifies things down
the road.

The `NAME` should either begin with `provider-` or `provisioner-`,
depending on what kind of plugin it will be. The repository name will,
by default, be the name of the binary produced by `go install` for
your plugin package.

With the package directory made, create a `main.go` file. This project will
be a binary so the package is "main":

```golang
package main

import (
	"github.com/hashicorp/terraform/plugin"
)

func main() {
	plugin.Serve(new(MyPlugin))
}
```

The name `MyPlugin` is a placeholder for the struct type that represents
your plugin's implementation. This must implement either
`terraform.ResourceProvider` or `terraform.ResourceProvisioner`, depending
on the plugin type.

To test your plugin, the easiest method is to copy your `terraform` binary
to `$GOPATH/bin` and ensure that this copy is the one being used for testing.
`terraform init` will search for plugins within the same directory as the
`terraform` binary, and `$GOPATH/bin` is the directory into which `go install`
will place the plugin executable.
