Resource Deployment

This blog is a quick 101 introduction for anybody wanting to know how to quickly and easily deploy an Azure resource using Terraform with end to end easy instructions.

Deployment Steps:

Step 1 - Authenticating on Azure

Terraform must authenticate to Azure to create infrastructure

az login

Your browser will open and prompt you to enter your Azure login credentials. After a successful authentication, your terminal will display your subscription information.

Step 2 - select your target subscription

Find the subscription id for your target subscription then set the subscription.

az account set –subscription “dc5a212d-0000-0000-0000-0000”

Step 3 - Create a Service Principal

Provisioning an Azure AD Service Principal will be automated by Terraform.

The Service Principal will be used by Terraform to perform actions on your behalf.

Begin by assigning the permission and scope of the Service Principal

(Here we are assigning Contributor role to the subscription).

The Service Principal will be provisioned by TF.

az ad sp create-for-rbac –role=”Contributor” –scopes=”/subscriptions/dc5a212d-0000-0000-0000-0000″

Step 4 - Set your environment variables from the Service Principal

Once you have executed the command from step 3, you will be presented with the new service principal created by and for Terraform.

HashiCorp recommends setting these values as environment variables rather than saving them in your Terraform configuration.

$ $Env:ARM_CLIENT_ID = "<APPID_VALUE>"
$ $Env:ARM_CLIENT_SECRET = "<PASSWORD_VALUE>"
$ $Env:ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID = "<SUBSCRIPTION_ID>"
$ $Env:ARM_TENANT_ID = "<TENANT_VALUE>"

Deployments

Write configuration

Step 1 – Create a local folder

New-Item -Path “c:\” -Name “allen-terraform-azure” -ItemType “directory”

Step 2 – Create a new file called main.tf

New-Item C:\allen-terraform-azure\main.tf
 

Code can be found here for populating with various resources.

Step 3 – Change to TF directory

Cd C:\allen-terraform-azure\

Step 4 – Initialize your Terraform configuration

terraform init

Step 5 – Format and validate the configuration

terraform fmt

If there are no errors in your format, then you won’t see any output.

Step 6 – Apply your Terraform Configuration

terraform apply

You will be asked for confirmation > yes

Step 7 – Inspect the current state

terraform show

Step 9 - Verification

Verify the build in your Azure Portal

–End–