Verbose Logging and its Outcome

Terraform can generate detailed logs by setting the environment variable TF_LOG to a particular level of verbosity.

Log levels

There are five log levels. From most verbose to least, they are TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, and ERROR. The logs’ output is sent to stderr. If the TF_LOG variable is set to anything other than one of the listed log levels (like TF_LOG=HAMSTER), Terraform will set the log verbosity to TRACE.

If we want to write the resulting logs to a file location, we can set the environment variable TF_LOG_PATH to the full path of the desired file location—for example, /var/logs/terraform/my_- log.log.

What happens when Terraform crashes?

In addition to logs being sent to stderr, Terraform will also generate a log file if the executable crashes. The log file contains the debug logs, panic message, and backtrace saved to the crash.log file.