terraform init initialize the current Terraform working directory. I guess it does a lot under the hood which unfortunately won’t be the topic for today. Instead, I’ll share with you a bash script that could help with initializing the TF backend stored on AWS.
Prerequisites
- Terraform
Solution
Managing Terraform state with AWS is done by saving the state file in an encrypted and versioned S3 bucket and locking is managed by a DynamoDB table. You might want to create these two resources beforehand thus, leading to a chicken-egg problem (correct me if I’m wrong) where initially the TF state will be stored on your local machine. Now, there’s a bunch of posts online you could look for on how to do the setup properly, so once you got that figured out, take a look at the following script that I’ve found and modified a bit to fit my requirements:
#!/bin/bash
# Usage: ./init.sh once to initialize remote storage for this environment.
# Subsequent tf actions in this environment don't require re-initialization,
# unless you have completely cleared your .terraform cache.
#
# terraform plan -var-file=./prod.tfvars
# terraform apply -var-file=./prod.tfvars
TF_VAR_s3_bucket="devcoops-tf-state"
TF_VAR_state_file="devcoops.tfstate"
TF_VAR_dynamodb_lock="devcoops-tf-state-lock"
TF_VAR_aws_region="eu-west-1"
terraform init \
-backend-config="bucket=$TF_VAR_s3_bucket" \
-backend-config="key=$TF_VAR_state_file" \
-backend-config="dynamodb_table=$TF_VAR_dynamodb_lock" \
-backend-config="region=$TF_VAR_aws_region" \
-backend-config="encrypt=true"
echo "set remote s3 state to $TF_ENV.tfstate"
Conclusion
Feel free to share any ideas or improvements over the given example above. On a side note, follow our official channel on Telegram.