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Application templates

This page explains concepts associated with HCP Waypoint application templates.

Background

HCP Waypoint application templates are common infrastructure patterns created and maintained by platform engineers. They ensure that any infrastructure provisioned using a template is compliant with your organization's policies for security, finance, scaling, and more. Application developers create applications from templates to provision standardized infrastructure when deploying their applications.

Templates serve as a starting point for application developers. For example, an application template can consist of a code repository template configured with your organization's default frontend framework, linting libraries, and CI/CD pipelines. Other examples of application templates can be a production-ready Kubernetes cluster or backend API framework that is configured for serverless.

HCP Waypoint application templates reference Terraform Cloud no-code modules to define the common infrastructure patterns.

Workflow

Refer to How does HCP Waypoint work? for an overview of the workflow. The following steps describe the application template creation and consumption model:

  1. A platform engineer creates the following artifacts:

    • A no-code module that references an HCP Waypoint application: No-code modules are Terraform Cloud artifacts that allow you to deploy a module's resources without writing Terraform configuration. Refer to Designing No-Code Ready Modules in the Terraform documentation for additional information.
    • An HCP Waypoint application template associated with the no-code module.

    Platform engineer creates and maintains no-code modules in Terraform Cloud. They configure HCP Waypoint application templates and add-on definitions to reference the no-code modules. Platform engineer creates and maintains no-code modules in Terraform Cloud. They configure HCP Waypoint application templates and add-on definitions to reference the no-code modules.

    Refer to Create and manage application templates for details and instructions on how to complete this process.

  2. An application engineer selects a suitable template in the HCP Waypoint interface to create new applications, triggering the following automated procedure:

    • HCP Waypoint uses the template's Terraform no-code module to create a Terraform workspace in the Terraform Cloud organization as configured by the platform engineer.
    • HCP Waypoint assigns the waypoint_application variable to the Terraform workspace. Your no-code module can reference this value to label the resources it deploys.
    • HCP Waypoint starts a Terraform run in the workspace. When the Terraform workspace run completes, the HCP Waypoint application and underlying infrastructure is ready.

    Application developer use application templates to create HCP Waypoint applications. The template triggers the no-code module in Terraform Cloud, which creates an HCP Waypoint application. Application developer use application templates to create HCP Waypoint applications. The template triggers the no-code module in Terraform Cloud, which creates an HCP Waypoint application.

    Once HCP Waypoint creates the application, the application developer can follow the "Developer instructions" provided by the application template to modify the boilerplate and start deploying their applications onto the infrastructure.

    Refer to Use a template to deploy and manage an application for details and instructions on how to complete this process.