Part 3 connects the two halves of your setup: MiniStack running locally, and Terraform actually talking to it. The good news — it's all one provider block. Dummy credentials, a couple of settings to skip the checks Terraform normally runs, and endpoint URLs pointed at localhost instead of AWS. Everything else in your Terraform code — resources, modules, plan, apply — stays exactly the same.
There's also a neat trick buried in here: pass a made-up 12-digit number as your access key, and MiniStack treats it as a separate fake AWS account, letting you practice cross-account setups without provisioning anything real.
What each line in the provider block is actually doing
Why your resource code never has to know it's talking to MiniStack instead of AWS
The account-ID trick for testing cross-account references locally
Get this one block right, and the rest of the series builds on it directly.
— JC
