In today’s world, security and compliance are paramount concerns for organizations. With the increasing adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and the proliferation of cyber threats, ensuring the security and compliance of infrastructure resources has become a challenging task. Terratest Compliance Testing is an open-source testing framework that helps organizations test the compliance of their infrastructure resources against industry standards and regulations. In this blog post, we will explore the basics of Terratest Compliance Testing and provide some unique code snippet examples to help you get started.
What is Terratest Compliance Testing?
Terratest Compliance Testing is a testing framework that is designed to test the compliance of infrastructure resources against industry standards and regulations. It allows organizations to define compliance tests using popular compliance frameworks such as CIS, NIST, and GDPR, among others. These tests can be executed against the target infrastructure resources, and any deviations from the defined compliance policies are reported. This helps organizations ensure that their infrastructure resources are compliant with industry standards and regulations.
Terratest Compliance Testing is built on top of the Terratest testing framework, which is a popular open-source testing framework for infrastructure code. Terratest Compliance Testing extends Terratest’s functionality to include compliance testing capabilities.
Terratest Compliance Testing Features
Terratest Compliance Testing offers a number of features that make it a popular choice for compliance testing. Some of the key features include:
- Compliance Framework Integration: Terratest Compliance Testing integrates with popular compliance frameworks such as CIS, NIST, and GDPR, among others. This allows organizations to define compliance tests using their preferred compliance framework.
- Infrastructure as Code Support: Terratest Compliance Testing supports testing of infrastructure code such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Kubernetes manifests. This allows organizations to test the compliance of their infrastructure resources at the code level.
- Custom Compliance Tests: Terratest Compliance Testing allows organizations to define custom compliance tests to test against their own internal policies and regulations.
- Report Generation: Terratest Compliance Testing generates detailed reports that outline any deviations from the defined compliance policies. This helps organizations identify and remediate compliance issues.
- Reusability: Terratest Compliance Testing promotes code reusability by allowing organizations to define compliance tests as reusable modules. This allows organizations to easily apply the same compliance tests to multiple infrastructure resources.
Getting Started with Terratest Compliance Testing
To get started with Terratest Compliance Testing, you will need to have some basic knowledge of Go programming language, Terratest testing framework, and infrastructure code such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation. You will also need to have some familiarity with popular compliance frameworks such as CIS or NIST.
Once you have the required knowledge, you can follow these steps to get started with Terratest Compliance Testing:
Step 1: Install Terratest Compliance Testing
The first step is to install Terratest Compliance Testing. You can do this by running the following command:

This command installs the Terratest Compliance Testing module.
Step 2: Define Compliance Tests
The next step is to define compliance tests. You can define compliance tests using popular compliance frameworks such as CIS or NIST. For example, the following code snippet defines a CIS compliance test for AWS EC2 instances:

And the Below code snippet defines a compliance test for ensuring that a resource group in Azure is compliant with a specified Azure Policy. The test checks if all virtual machines in the resource group are encrypted and reports a compliance status. You can customize this test by changing the subscription ID, resource group name, policy definition ID, and expected compliance status.

Overall, Terratest Compliance is a powerful tool for ensuring compliance in infrastructure code. Its ability to define compliance tests using code, along with its integration with Terratest, makes it a valuable addition to any developer’s toolkit.
For more details get in touch with Rahul Miglani at Rahul.Miglani@NashTechglobal.com