In this article, we'll try to learn something about HCL, a declarative configuration language that HashiCrop uses in its products.

Our goal will be to try to understand HCL purely as a language. In other words, as much as possible, we'll try to understand it independently of the tools. Since we're not specifically working on a product like Terraform, Packer, etc., the examples we write will be on one or more of HashiCorp's products. But we won't be able to run all the code.

At the very end, we'll be doing runnable code examples. If I can continue, in the second article of this piece we'll also try to examine and learn Terraform on Azure.

Happy reading.

What Is HCL?

HCL is a declarative configuration language developed by HashiCrop.

Literally, the word declarative means "stating" or "declaring". To open it up a bit, we call declarative the languages where we just say what we want without worrying about how the code will work, and the language itself prepares the result for us.…