HashiCorp Supported Languages and Libraries

Go

Go is currently the only programming language supported by HashiCorp for building Terraform providers.

Libraries for writing providers

HashiCorp offers two Go programming language Software Development Kits (SDKs) for building Terraform providers:

Terraform Plugin Framework

Terraform Plugin Framework is HashiCorp's most recent SDK, and is the current recommended way to develop Terraform providers.

Terraform Plugin SDK

Terraform Plugin SDK, also referred to in documentation as SDKv2, is the prior SDK that many existing Terraform providers use. It is maintained for Terraform versions 1.x and earlier, but we have stopped most feature development so we can focus on improving Terraform Plugin Framework.

Other provider libraries

Terraform Plugin Go

Terraform Plugin Go provides low-level Go bindings for the Terraform Plugin Protocol for integrations to be built upon. It is only meant for advanced use cases, as it strives to be a minimal possible abstraction on top of the protocol, only hiding the implementation details of the protocol while leaving its semantics unchanged.

Other Languages

There has been a lot of interest in writing providers using languages other than Go, and people frequently ask for information on how to go about doing that. The Terraform team's policy at this time is that while it is technically possible to write providers in languages other than Go, our tooling, documentation, and ecosystem will all assume your provider is being written in and distributed as Go code for the time being. This means we will not be writing any documentation on how to build a non-Go provider, nor will we be providing support or answering questions about it.

While it is possible to write a non-Go provider, thanks to Terraform's use of the gRPC protocol, it is harder than it may appear at first glance. Multiple packages, from encoders and decoders to Terraform's type system, would all need to be reimplemented in that new language. The Terraform Plugin Framework would also need to be reimplemented, which is not a trivial challenge. And the way non-Go providers would interact with the Registry, terraform init, and other pieces of the Terraform ecosystem is unclear.

At this point, our efforts are focused on providing the best development experience for Terraform providers written in Go that we can. The Terraform provider development experience is still evolving aggressively, as is Terraform's interface for providers. We may reconsider this policy once there is a more stable interface to build on and our development experience with Go has matured and evolved sufficiently.