Which of the following steps is required to initialize Terraform before provisioning?

• A. Destroy
• B. Apply
• C. Init
• D. Validate

Answer: (C)

Initializing Terraform is the step that prepares your environment for provisioning. It downloads and installs provider plugins, fetches modules, and configures the backend for state management. This setup is necessary before you can generate a plan or apply changes because Terraform needs the actual provider binaries and module code, and a configured backend, to understand what to create and where to store state. The other actions occur after initialization: applying creates or updates resources, destroying removes them, and validating checks syntax but doesn’t fetch providers or configure the backend. So the initialization step is the one that must run before provisioning.