Terraform Provider

The sys terraform provider allows provisionning configuration management resource to local hosts. This is the equivalent of the local terraform provider, but with more features, including script resources.

The idea was that traditional configuration management tools were lacking important features that terraform has. In particular the tfstate is a great feature that allows to rollback the deployment to its initial state. With configuration management tools, the only source of truth is your code and when you modify it, some resources created from previous executions might be left over, creating some unclean state.

Requirements

Terraform 0.10.x
Go 1.11 (to build the provider plugin)

Building The Provider

Run make build outside GOPATH or with GO111MODULE=on

Using the provider

Place the terraform-provider-remote executable in ~/.terraform.d/plugins

You can do so with make user-install

See: https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/providers.html#third-party-plugins

Developing the Provider

If you wish to work on the provider, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (version 1.11+ is required). You'll also need to correctly setup a GOPATH, as well as adding $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH.

To compile the provider, run make build. This will build the provider and put the provider binary in the $GOPATH/bin directory.

$ make bin
...
$ $GOPATH/bin/terraform-provider-remote
...

In order to test the provider, you can simply run make test.

$ make test

In order to run the full suite of Acceptance tests, run make testacc.

Note: Acceptance tests create real resources, and often cost money to run.

$ make testacc

Making a release

From the upstream documentation:

export GPG_FINGERPRINT=01230FD4CC29DE17
export GITHUB_TOKEN=...
Cache passphrase with gpg --armor --detach-sign --local-user $GPG_FINGERPRINT </dev/null
Create tag: git tag -s -u $GPG_FINGERPRINT vx.x.x
Make release: goreleaser release --rm-dist
~~Publish release on GitHub~~

Test out the provider before making the release

See https://www.terraform.io/docs/extend/how-terraform-works.html and https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/config/config-file.html#development-overrides-for-provider-developers

First, build the provider:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o terraform-provider-sys .

If necessary, deploy the provider to a remote host

rsync -z --rsh=ssh --info=progress2 terraform-provider-sys user@host:/tmp/terraform-provider-sys

Place this snippet first in ~/.terraformrc:

provider_installation {

  # Use /home/developer/tmp/terraform-null as an overridden package directory
  # for the hashicorp/null provider. This disables the version and checksum
  # verifications for this provider and forces Terraform to look for the
  # null provider plugin in the given directory.
  dev_overrides {
    # The directory should contain a terraform-provider-sys executable
    "mildred/sys" = "/tmp"
  }

  # For all other providers, install them directly from their origin provider
  # registries as normal. If you omit this, Terraform will _only_ use
  # the dev_overrides block, and so no other providers will be available.
  direct {}
}