@matwolbec tutorials

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Initializing the Terraform file structure

To get providers documentations, use the Terraform Registry. You will find a lot of available providers there. In our case: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/guides/azure_cli

• Open the main.tf file with your IDE

• Like said on the guide above, insert the content below in the main.tf file:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    azurerm = {
      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"
      version = "=3.0.0"
    }
  }
}

# Configure the Microsoft Azure Provider
provider "azurerm" {
  features {}
}

• Run the command to install the provider package and set the workdir:

terraform init

Workaround for WSL2

If you are using the WSL2 (linux on windows) like me, there is a DNS issue where the Terraform tries to resolute the management.azure.com without success.

For further info: GitHub Microsoft WSL issues 8022

I found this workaround, resolving the record with dig and adding to your /etc/hosts file. Another alternative is to set custom DNS server on your /etc/resolv.conf.

sudo bash -c 'echo "$(dig management.azure.com | grep -E -o "([0-9]{1,3}[\.]){3}[0-9]{1,3}$") management.azure.com" >> /etc/hosts'

If you need to update the host IP address (usually if you have changed your region you will want it), run:

sudo bash -c "sed -i '/management.azure.com/d' /etc/hosts" ; sudo bash -c 'echo "$(dig management.azure.com | grep -E -o "([0-9]{1,3}[\.]){3}[0-9]{1,3}$") management.azure.com" >> /etc/hosts'

Define our first resource

A resource group is a container that holds related resources for a solution.

You decide how you want to allocate resources to resource groups based on what makes the most sense for you.

A resource group could be all instances needed to run your application, like APP, DB and some Cache, or your can create a DB Cluster as one group and create another to your APP.

Generally, add resources that share the same lifecycle to the same resource group so you can easily deploy, update, and delete them as a group.

• PS: Microsoft Azure is limiting resources by location to free accounts, so we will use the australiaeast region where are available computing resources for testing purposes.

In your main.tf file, add a code block:

# Create a resource group
resource "azurerm_resource_group" "default" {
  name     = "staging-resources"
  location = "australiaeast"
}

Let’s run terraform to see our plan (it could take some time):

terraform plan

And now let’s apply and it will be provisioned on Azure. You have to confirm the action with yes:

terraform apply

tfstate file

After you run apply, the resource was generated. Now you should notice a new file on your workdir: terraform.tfstate. Meanwhile, this file shouldn’t be deleted once it’s your resource control. When you edit your main.tf file and run plan or apply, it will check this file, compare, and just then request the needed info to the provider API.

Destroying our first resource

An important thing is to destroy your resources after you have done with your objectives, avoiding additional costs. Run the command and remember to type yes and confirm:

terraform destroy

Adding resources

Tagging your resource is a good advice, you will have a clearer control of what is it and which environment it belongs. So let’s add some tag to our resource group in main.tf:

  tags = {
    "env" = "staging"
    "project" = "myapp"
  }

The complete block should be like:

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "default" {
  name     = "staging-resources"
  location = "australiaeast"
  tags = {
    "env" = "staging"
    "project" = "myapp"
  }
}

And run:

terraform apply

Next steps

Go to page 3 to create a resource to store the tfstate remotely