Installing Terraform – Deploying Skills Mapper

by Ali Axelrod Deletion of bucket, Exams of Google Cloud, Google Cloud Certification Exams, New Project Creation, Reintroducing Terraform

Terraform is a command-line tool that you can install on your local machine. It’s compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux, and you can download it directly from the Terraform website. After downloading, you’ll need to add it to your system’s path to enable command-line execution. You can verify the installation by running terraform –version, which should return the installed version.

Terraform makes use of plugins that allow it to communicate with the APIs of service providers like Google Cloud. Not surprisingly, in this setup, you will mainly be using the Google Cloud provider. Terraform is not perfect, though, and it is common to come across small limitations. The Skills Mapper deployment is no exception, so there are a few workarounds required.

Terraform Workflow

Using the Terraform tool has four main steps:

terraform init

Initialize the Terraform environment and download any plugins needed.

terraform plan

Show what Terraform will do. Terraform will check the current state, compare it to the desired state, and show what it will do to get there.

terraform apply

Apply the changes to the infrastructure. Terraform will make the changes to the infrastructure to get to the desired state.

terraform destroy

Destroy the infrastructure. Terraform will remove all the infrastructure it created.

Terraform Configuration

Terraform uses configuration files to define the desired state. For Skills Mapper, this is in the terraform directory or the GitHub repository. There are many files in this configuration, and they are separated into modules, which is Terraform’s way of grouping functionality for reuse.

Preparing for Terraform

Several prerequisites need to be in place before you can deploy using Terraform.

Creating Projects

First, you need to create two projects, an application project and a management project, as you did earlier in the book. Both projects must have a billing project enabled. The instructions for this is are Chapter 4.

Ensure you have the names of these projects available as environment variables (e.g., skillsmapper-application and skillsmapper-management, respectively):

APPLICATION_PROJECT_ID
=
skillsmapper-application

MANAGEMENT_PROJECT_ID
=
skillsmapper-management