# Reading Terraform outputs from a YAML pipeline

When using Terraform and YAML pipelines in Azure DevOps, it’s not clear how to read the output variables of a Terraform configuration.

### The basics

First, you have to **name** the task that you’re using to _apply_.

    - task: TerraformTaskV1@0
      name: TerraformOutputs
      inputs:
        provider: 'azurerm'
        command: 'apply'
    

Then, the task will store the output variables in a _json_ file in a certain file path. You can get this path through the `jsonOutputVariablesPath` variable.

Then you can use this Azure DevOps task output variable and read the file then parse it for values.

For example, here’s an example using bash reading the `cluster_name` and the `resource_group_name` output variables from Terraform.

    
    - bash: |
        CLUSTER_NAME=$(cat $(TerraformOutputs.jsonOutputVariablesPath) | jq '.cluster_name.value' -r)
        RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME=$(cat $(TerraformOutputs.jsonOutputVariablesPath) | jq '.resource_group_name.value' -r)
    
    

How this works is this:

*   Using bash, we use `cat` to read the contents of the file
*   Then, we _pipe_ the output to an utility called **jq** which will parse the raw string to json and allow us to filter its values
*   Applying a **jq** filter, we look for the _raw value_ of those variables. For example: [see this snippet](https://jqplay.org/s/5PXsqvY2UQ)
*   We assign the filtered value to a variable

### Pipeline Variables

Once the value is parsed, it can then be assigned to a pipeline variable. Here’s how to do it from bash.

    echo "##vso[task.setvariable variable=Outputs.ClusterName]$CLUSTER_NAME"