Terraform Backend – Deploying Skills Mapper
Terraform records the state of all the infrastructure it has created so that when the configuration is applied, it only makes the changes needed to get the infrastructure to the desired state. There could be no changes, the configuration could have been changed, or the infrastructure could have been changed outside Terraform, for example by someone issuing gcloud commands. Terraform will work out what needs to be done to get to the desired state.
By default, Terraform keeps this state on the machine that was used to apply the configuration. This means it cannot be shared. Alternatively, Terraform state can store the state of the infrastructure in a backend. In the case of Google Cloud, you can use a Cloud Storage bucket for this purpose.
Create a Cloud Storage bucket to store the Terraform state using gcloud in the management project. As bucket names need to be unique, using the project number as a suffix is a good way to ensure this.
Configure Identity Platform
In Chapter 7, you enabled Identity Platform. If you have created a new application project, you will need to enable it again in the project and make a note of the API key, as you will need to pass it to Terraform as a variable.
Setting Terraform Variables
Terraform uses variables to customize the configuration. These are defined in a terraform.tfvars file in the terraform directory. Many of these have defaults you can override, but you will need to set the following variables before deployment.
Create a terraform.tfvars file in the terraform directory with the following content:
| Key | Example value | Description |
| domain | skillsmapper.org | The domain name to use for the environment |
| region | europe-west2 | The region to deploy the environment to |
| billing_account | 014… | The ID of the billing account associated with your projects |
| management_project_id | skillsmapper-management | The ID of the management project |
| application_project_id | skillsmapper-application | The ID of the application project |
| api_key | AIzaSyC… | The API key for Identity Platform |
| app_installation_id | skillsmapper | The ID of the app installation for GitHub used when setting up the factory |
| github_repo | https://github.com/SkillsMapper/skillsmapper.git | The name of the GitHub repository to use for the factory |
| github_token | ghp_… | The GitHub token to use for the factory |
If you have set all the environment variables for other chapters in this book, you can generate the terraform.tfvars from the file terraform.tfvars.template in the example code:
envsubst
<
terraform.tfvars.template
>
terraform.tfvars
With this file created, you are ready to deploy using Terraform.