index.md

Terraform Lab 7

Overview

In this lab, you will create an S3 bucket and migrate the Terraform state to a remote backend.

Create an S3 bucket

AWS requires every S3 bucket to have a unique name. For this reason, add your initials to the end of the bucket. The example below uses jrs as the initials.

In the tf-lab3/learn-terraform-variables directory create a new file s3.tf with the following:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "remote_state" {
        bucket = "remote-state-jrs"
    acl = "private"
    
    tags = {
        Name = "remote state backend"
    }
}

So that we can easily retrieve the name of the bucket in the future add the following to outputs.tf

output "s3_bucket" {
  description = "S3 bucket name"
  value       = aws_s3_bucket.remote_state.id
}

Using Terraform apply the changes.

Migrate the state

Now that we've created an S3 bucket, we need to migrate the state to the remote backend.

When creating the backend configuration remember to replace the bucket with the name of the bucket you created.

Create backend.tf with the following:

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    region = "us-west-2"
    bucket = "remote-state-jrs"
    key = "state.tfstate"
  }
}

Reinitialize Terraform

Now that you have created the S3 bucket and configured the backend.tf you must run terraform init to migrate the state to the new remote backend.

If everything is successful you should see a message telling you the backend was migrated.