I have some Terraform configuration which has up until now run successfully without any issues locally and without me explicitly inserting any provider block.

I transferred this very same set of configuration to a GitLab pipeline with 4 pipeline stages of Validate, Plan, Apply and Destroy declared in my .gitlab-ci.yml file and suddenly the 'terraform plan' command fails at the Plan stage with the below "Invalid provider configuration" error.

This is all despite the fact that the 'terraform validate' command runs successfully at the initial pipeline stage - Validate.

Any idea why my configuration will suddenly be throwing this error in my GitLab pipeline when it's been perfectly fine when run locally?