How Rosetta Broke My Terraform Setup (and How I Fixed It on Apple Silicon)

🛠️ How Rosetta Broke My Terraform Setup (and How I Fixed It on Apple Silicon)

Everything was working fine — until it wasn’t.

While setting up a Kubernetes homelab using Terraform inside a devbox environment on my M1 Mac (macOS 15.5, Apple Silicon), I started hitting this dreaded error:

Error: Failed to load plugin schemas

Error while loading schemas for plugin components: Failed to obtain provider schema: Could not load the schema for provider registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws:
failed to instantiate provider "registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws" to obtain schema: timeout while waiting for plugin to start..

Re-running terraform validate or terraform plan produced the same issue, even though terraform init was succeeding.

🧩 The Clue: Architecture Mismatch

After some digging, I noticed strange behavior:

• Running uname -m in my terminal gave arm64 (✅ expected).

• But inside tmux, it showed x86_64 (❌ unexpected).

• Even worse, terraform showed:

    Terraform v1.10.5  
    on darwin_amd64
  

  ...even though I'm on Apple Silicon.

Eventually, I realized that Homebrew was installed under /usr/local — the default path for Intel Macs. I’m fairly certain a recent macOS upgrade caused this regression, as I had set things up correctly before. This led to brew installing x86_64 versions of tools, even though I’m on an M1 Pro (ARM64). That meant:

• All my brew install ... commands were installing x86_64 binaries.

• Tools like terraform and tmux were running under Rosetta.

• devbox was pulling in these x86 versions too.

• Result: native ARM Terraform tried to run x86 plugins — and failed.

🛠️ The Fix

Here's how I cleaned everything up and got Terraform working natively:

1. ✅ Uninstall x86 Homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"

2. ✅ Reinstall Homebrew for Apple Silicon

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Make sure it installs to: /opt/homebrew

3. ✅ Update your $PATH

Add to your shell profile:

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

Then reload:

source ~/.bash_profile   # or ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

4. ✅ Reinstall all your tools

Now reinstall tmux, terraform, etc., so they are built for ARM:

brew install tmux terraform

Make sure they are native:

file $(which terraform)
/opt/homebrew/bin/terraform: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

Same for tmux and anything else.

5. ✅ Fix tmux architecture issue

Previously, launching tmux forced my terminal into x86 mode. After reinstalling via ARM Homebrew, tmux now behaves correctly:

uname -m         # arm64
tmux
uname -m         # still arm64 ✅

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💡 Devbox & Terraform: Final Check

Now that everything is ARM-native:

devbox shell
terraform version
terraform validate

No more plugin timeouts. No need for GODEBUG or weird init -upgrade workarounds.

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✅ TL;DR

Symptoms:

• Terraform plugin schema timeouts

• terraform validate fails

• Architecture mismatch (x86_64 inside tmux)

• terraform reports darwin_amd64 on an M1/M2 Mac

Fix:

• Uninstall Intel Homebrew

• Reinstall native ARM Homebrew

• Reinstall all tools via ARM Homebrew

• Update $PATH

• Verify with file $(which terraform)

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If you're using an M1/M2 Mac and Devbox, always make sure your entire stack is running ARM64 natively — otherwise, you'll spend hours chasing down obscure errors like I did.

Let me know if this helped — or if you’ve run into something similar!