How to find the right documentation for any Terraform version

Problem

Introduction

While our terraform website always shows the documentation for the latest version of Terraform and makes occasional references to older versions, sometimes you might run into a situation where the current documentation or example does not work for you because you're on an older version.

To assist you with finding the right documentation for the version you're currently on, here are steps you can follow to view it.

Content Guide

• Locating Documentation with GitHub
• Locating Documentation with developer.hashicorp.com
• Release Information

Locating Documentation with GitHub

Steps

1. Navigate to https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform on your browser,

2. Click on the main branch drop down,

3. Click on the Tags section.

4. Scroll and select the Terraform version you're on. I'm using v1.10.0 as an example in this article.

5. On the resulting page, scroll down and click on the website folder.

6. On the resulting page, go towards the top left and locate the "Go to file" search bar.

7. First, identify the specific topic you need. Then, consult the documentation at developer.hashicorp.com to generate relevant search terms. For example, if you look at the address https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/providers, you can adapt your search query to focus on website/providers.

8. Select an appropriate folder to look through. In this case website/docs/language/providers. 

9. Browse through the relevant links to locate the page that matches the documentation you need. In this example, the “Providers Overview” page corresponds to the index.mdx file.

The figure above is an exact match to the documentation sourced from the website displayed below.

This method can also be applied to older Terraform versions. However, remember to adjust your search terms to match the structure and capabilities of those versions. For example, in the figure below, a search for website/providers on Terraform v0.14.6 reveals that the provider documentation is located in index.html.markdown instead of index.mdx.

Locating Documentation with developer.hashicorp.com

Steps

1. Navigate to https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform and observe the left hand menu. Navigate to the option Configuration Language.

2. After reaching the Configuration Language section, open the dropdown menu at the top right and select the Terraform version you need. At the time of this writing, the available options include v1.1 (and earlier) as well as the current release.

Release Information

Steps

1. Navigate to https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases.

2. In order to look at a specific release use click on the Tags icon located at the top left of the screen.

3.a Use the bottom of the page to tab back to previous release information. 

3.b The GitHub release pages for Terraform can be accessed at: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/tags?after=v1.1.0.

You can adjust the URL parameter ...?after=v#.#.# to quickly navigate to the release notes for a specific version.

For example, if you need version 1.0.10, modifying the link to ...?after=v1.1.0 or ...?after=v1.0.11 will display the release notes for 1.0.10.