terraform/website/source/docs/plugins/provider.html.md

---
layout: "docs"
page_title: "Provider Plugins"
sidebar_current: "docs-plugins-provider"
---

# Provider Plugins

A provider in Terraform is responsible for the lifecycle of a resource:
create, read, update, delete. An example of a provider is AWS, which
can manage resources of type `aws_instance`, `aws_eip`, `aws_elb`, etc.

The primary reasons to care about provider plugins are:

  * You want to add a new resource type to an existing provider.

  * You want to write a completely new provider for managing resource
    types in a system not yet supported.

  * You want to write a completely new provider for custom, internal
    systems such as a private inventory management system.

<div class="alert alert-block alert-warning">
<strong>Advanced topic!</strong> Plugin development is a highly advanced
topic in Terraform, and is not required knowledge for day-to-day usage.
If you don't plan on writing any plugins, we recommend not reading
this section of the documentation.
</div>

## Coming Soon!

The documentation for writing custom providers is coming soon. In the
mean time, you can look at how our
[built-in providers are written](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/tree/master/builtin).
We recommend copying as much as possible from our providers when working
on yours.

We're also rapidly working on improving the high-level helpers for
writing providers. We expect that writing providers will become much
easier very shortly, and acknowledge that writing them now is not the
easiest thing to do.