LAB01.md

LAB01 - Basics

Steps

1. Ensure you has terraform properly installed

terraform -v
terraform -h

2. Create directory for our code

mkdir src
cd src/

3. Create our first empty example and run terraform plan (It should say there are no changes)

touch example.tf
terraform init
terraform plan

4. Set up AzureRM provider (Do not use Azure Service Management Provider anymore, it's the legacy API)

provider "azurerm" {
    subscription_id = "subscription_id-example"
    client_id = "client_id-example"
    client_secret = "client_secret-example"
    tenant_id = "tenant_id-example"
    
}

Replace the placeholders with your credentials, you can follow this guide if you don't know them: Creating credentials for Azure provider. The recommended method is to use a service principal but you can use the Azure Cli also.

Execute:

terraform init
terraform providers
terraform plan

5. Create our first resource

Add the following code to the example.tf file:

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "terraform_sample" {
    name     = "terraform-sample"
    location = "West Europe"
}

Execute:

terraform apply

Check in the Azure portal that the resource has been created. You should do it during the workshop to ensure that terraform really works ;)

Try also:

terraform plan -destroy # Check what will be deleted  if we run a destroy command
terraform destroy # Destroy every declared resource
terraform apply -auto-approve # If we execute apply again the resources will be regenerated

Note: we use the -auto-approve option to avoid the prompt, and 'plan' is optional but recommended to be able to see what will happen

Check also what happens if we remove the resource from the code and if we execute:

terraform plan
terraform apply -auto-approve

As you can see, managed resources will be deleted if they dissapear from code. This is the common way to delete resources.

6. Prepare a plan and execute it

Did you notice this warning?

WARNING

Note: You didn't specify an "-out" parameter to save this plan, so Terraform can't guarantee that exactly these actions will be performed if "terraform apply" is subsequently run.

This is because when we are planning, we can save the shown plan to a file. By applying this plan later, Terraform will ensure that the state of your infrastructure is the same as when you planned to avoid unwanted changes.

Add the resource group again to the example.tf file:

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "terraform_sample" {
    name     = "terraform-sample"
    location = "West Europe"
}

Now we will prepare a plan (it won't be executed):

terraform plan -out=my.plan

And execute the plan:

terraform apply "my.plan"

This way, we will ensure that it will be executed only what we already planned and we will avoid conflicts with multiple concurrent executions.

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