Terraform

How to setup terraform with remote state S3

Terraform stores the state locally by default in the local project directory but we can also store this state remotely using the terraform backend.

Vasanth Jagadeesan

Vasanth Jagadeesan

— 3 min read
How to setup terraform with remote state S3
How to setup terraform with remote state s3 - mobilelabs.in

Terraform is developed by HashiCorp, it uses HCL language to build the infrastructure using the code. In this tutorial we are going to see how to setup the terraform and setup remote config state with AWS S3.

Terraform stores the state locally by default in the local project directory but we can also store this state remotely using the terraform backend. It supports all leading cloud storage like AWS S3, GCS Bucket, Azure Storage, and etc.

Though is setup is optional its is always recommended to use remote state as the best practice like keeping sensitive information off the disk and protects the state corruption with locks.

What you need to start

  1. AWS CLI
  2. Terraform
  3. VS Code
  4. S3 bucket for the storing remote state
Note: This article requires basic knowledge about AWS Infrastructure

Lets create main.tf file with the following content

provider "aws" {
  profile    = "default"
  region     = "ap-south-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "mobilelabs" {
  ami           = "ami-040c7ad0a93be494e"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

Here we are specifing the aws profile which is will default most of the time, you can specify the aws region in region field.

Amazon Machine Image(ami) is the operating system installed in the EC2 instance, This can be configured in ami field and instance type in the instance_type.

Now let's setup the AWS S3 backend to terraform state, create backend.tf file with the following content.

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    region = "ap-south-1"
    bucket = "mobilelabs.in"
    key = "mobilelabs.in/development/state.tfstate"
    encrypt = true    #AES-256 encryption
  }
}
Check out below link in case you want to learn about creating s3 bucket using terraform
Terraform - Create AWS s3 bucket
Learn how to create aws s3 bucket and set s3 lifecycle policy using terraform script with an example.
mobilelabsVasanth Jagadeesan

Project directory structure

mobilelabs.in - Terraform Project directory structure

let's run

terraform init -backend=true

Now you should run

terraform plan
mobilelabs.in - Terraform plan output

terraform apply

mobilelabs.in - terraform apply

Now you can check your s3 bucket and you should be able to find the state.tfstate file created.

mobilelabs.in - Terraform state synced in S3

lets checkout our EC2 instance created by terraform

mobilelabs.in - AWS console EC2 instance created by Terraform

To destroy the setup you just run

terraform destroy

This will delete all the created resource, isn't that really cool!!!

Latest on Terraform - Azure storage

How to setup terraform azure storage backend
In our previous post we have seen about using AWS s3 as remote state for terraform, In this article we are going to see how we can implement Azure storage as terraform backend.
mobilelabsVasanth Jagadeesan

Reference

1.  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-configure.html
2. https://www.terraform.io/docs/backends/types/s3.html

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