Cloud Vedas: terraform

While working with terraform you would have noticed that every time you execute a terraform plan it will download the latest version of terraform available for that provider.
While this is good if you are testing as you get the latest features but, it can create trouble in production if a buggy version gets deployed. So, it is always recommended that you lock down the version of provider. In this post we will show you how to do that.
It’s really very simple to lock down the provider version. You just have to add a snippet like below in your main.tf file .

provider "aws" {
  version="<=2.6.0"
  region  = "us-east-1"
}

In the above example we have specified that version 2.6.0 or older can be used.
The version argument value may either be a single explicit version or a version constraint string. Constraint strings use the following syntax to specify a range of versions that are acceptable:
>= 2.4.0: version 2.4.0 or newer
<= 2.4.0: version 2.4.0 or older
~> 2.4.0: any non-beta version >= 2.4.0 and < 2.5.0, e.g. 2.4.X
~> 2.4: any non-beta version >= 2.4.0 and < 3.0.0, e.g. 2.X.Y
>= 2.0.0, <= 3.0.0: any version between 2.0.0 and 3.0.0 inclusive
Give it a try and let us know if you have any query or suggestion.

Terraform is a very useful tool for IaaS. As you would have already known that it create a .tfstate file to save the status of infra. If you are doing testing you can save the .tfstate locally on your laptop. But, if you are working in prod environment with team then it's best that you save the .tfstate remotely so that it's secure and can be used by other team members.
Here we will show you two ways of configuring AWS S3 as backend to save the .tfstate file.

First way of configuring .tfstate is that you define it in the main.tf file. You will just have to add a snippet like below in your main.tf file.

terraform {

      backend "s3" {

          bucket="cloudvedas-test123"

          key="cloudvedas-test-s3.tfstate"

          region="us-east-1"

      }

}

Here we have defined following things.
bucket = The S3 bucket in which the .tfstate should be saved
key = The name of the .tfstate file
region = The region in which S3 backend bucket exists.
2 Another way of specifying the S3 backend is that you define it when you initialize the terraform using the init command. This can be useful when you want to invoke the terraform from a jenkins file.

Here is an example that you can execute in windows command prompt. This will do the same thing as we did in first example.

terraform init -no-color -reconfigure -force-copy -backend-config="region="us-east-1"" \

-backend-config="bucket="cloudvedas-test123"" -backend-config="key="cloudvedas-test1-win-s3.tfstate""

If you want to execute from a linux shell use below syntax.

 terraform init -no-color -reconfigure -force-copy \
-backend-config="region=us-east-1" \
-backend-config="bucket=cloudvedas-test123" \
-backend-config="key=cloudvedas-test-s3.tfstate"

Give it a try and let us know in comments section if you have any query or suggestion.

Cloud Vedas

Solved: How to lock Terraform provider version

Solved: How to configure Terraform backend on AWS S3