1. Verify you are in the correct directory by running 
    which terraform
  2. Locate the directory containing your terraform files

  3. Initialize the directory with 
    terraform init
  4. View the Terraform execution plan with 
    terraform plan
  5. Apply the Terraform execution plan with 
    terraform apply
  6. Observe the infrastructure provisioned by Terraform in the AWS Management Console

  7. Return to the terminal and terminate the infrastructure with 
    terraform destroy

Demo Code

Here is the Terraform code I used for main.tf. If you’d like to try to run the code, save your main.tf to a working directory in your Terraform root directory and run it there with terraform init, terraform plan, terraform apply, terraform destroy.

provider "aws" {
  access_key = "<Your Access Key>"
  secret_key = "<Your Secret Key>"
  region = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "Udacity" {
  ami = "ami-0323c3dd2da7fb37d"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}