Terraform remote backend for cloud and local with Azure DevOps Terraform Task

When working with Terraform, you will do a lot of work/testing locally. Therefore, you do not want to store your state file in a remote storage, and instead just store it locally. However, when deploy you don’t want to then be converting the configuration at that point and can get messy working with Azure DevOps. This is a solution that works for both local development and production deployment with the Azure DevOps Terraform Task.

The official Terraform Task in Azure DevOps by Microsoft is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.custom-terraform-tasks

When using this task you configure the cloud provider you will be using as a Backend service like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These details can be used to configure the Backend Service to store the State file, but they require the Terraform code to implement the service.

You can see all the different types here: https://www.terraform.io/docs/backends/types/index.html

For this walk through I will use the Azure Resource Manager, which uses an Azure Storage Account, as the example, but as mentioned this can be used in any provider.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/backends/types/azurerm.html

This would be the standard Terraform configuration you would need for setting up the Backend Service for Azure:

terraform { backend "azurerm" { resource_group_name = "StorageAccount-ResourceGroup" storage_account_name = "abcd1234" container_name = "tfstate" key = "prod.terraform.tfstate" } }

When using this locally, you don’t want any of this in your main.tf Terraform file else it will error with no detail or add the state to the Azure Storage Account. Therefore, locally you will not add this.

Instead during the deployment using the Azure DevOps Pipelines, we will inject the configuration. This will be done, by inserting a backend.tf file using PowerShell. Within the file, we will inject the configuration, but we don’t need all the parameters as they are inserted by the Terraform task.

We will inject just:

terraform { backend "azurerm" { } }

Which as a single like string we will need to stringify it to:

"terraform { `r`n backend ""azurerm"" {`r`n} `r`n }"

Using the PowerShell task we can then check for if the file already exist and if not then inject it into the same location as the main.tf file. This then causes when Terraform runs to process it with a Backend Service and with the Azure details we have provided in the Task.

View the full formatted result in the original post > http://prcode.co.uk/2020/11/25/terraform-remote-backend-with-azure-devops-terraform-task/

Originally published at http://prcode.co.uk on November 25, 2020.