This terraform provider aims to minimise as much as possible the efforts needed from service providers to create and
maintain custom terraform providers. This provider uses terraform as the engine that will orchestrate and manage the cycle
of the resources and depends on a swagger file (hosted on a remote endpoint) to successfully configure itself dynamically at runtime.
What are the main pain points that this terraform provider tries to tackle?
- As as service provider, you can focus on improving the service itself rather than the tooling around it.
- Due to the dynamic nature of this terraform provider, the service provider can continue expanding the functionality
of the different APIs by introducing new versions, and this terraform provider will be able to discover the new resource versions automatically without the need to add support for those as you would when mantining your own custom Terraform provider.
- Find consistency across APIs provided by different teams encouraging the adoption of OpenAPI specification for
describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful Web services.
Overview
API terraform provider is a powerful full-fledged terraform provider that is able to configure itself at runtime based on
a Swagger specification file containing the definitions of the APIs exposed. The dynamic nature of
this provider is what makes it very flexible and convenient for service providers as subsequent upgrades
to their APIs will not require new compilations of this provider.
The service provider APIs are discovered on the fly and therefore the service providers can focus on their services
rather than the tooling around it.
Pre-requirements
- The service provider hosts APIs compliant with OpenApi and swagger spec file is available via a discovery endpoint.
Requirements
- Terraform v0.12.0 (to execute the terraform provider plugin)
- Go 1.12.4 (to build the provider plugin)
- This project uses go modules for dependency management
- Docker 17.09.0-ce (to run service provider example)
- Docker-compose 1.16.1 (to run service provider example)
- Terraform expects third party providers to be manually installed in the '.terraform.d/plugins' sub-path in your user's home directory.
- Terraform expects terraform provider names to follow a specific naming scheme. The naming scheme for plugins is
terraform-<type>-NAME_vX.Y.Z
, where type is either provider or provisioner.
More information about how terraform discovers third party terraform providers and naming conventions here.
There are multiple ways how the OpenAPI Terraform provider can be installed. Please
refer to the OpenAPI Terraform provider installation document
to learn more about it.
After having provisioned your environment with the OpenAPI Terraform provider you can now write Terraform configuration files using resources provided
by the OpenAPI service. Refer to Using the OpenAPI Terraform Provider doc for more details.
You can generate the Terraform documentation automatically given an already Terraform compatible OpenAPI document using the The OpenAPI Terraform Documentation Renderer
library. The OpenAPI document is the source of truth for both the OpenAPI Terraform provider as well as the user facing documentation.
References
Additionally, the following documents provide deep insight regarding OpenAPI and Terraform as well as frequently asked questions:
- How to document contains information about how to define a swagger file following good practises that
make it work seamlessly with this terraform provider. Additionally, learn more about what is currently supported.
- Migrating to Terraform 0.12. This document describes
how to update configuration created using Terraform v0.11 to v0.12.
- FAQ document answers for the most frequently asked questions.
Contributing
Please follow the guidelines from:
References
- go-swagger: Api terraform provider makes extensive use of this library
which offers a very convenient implementation to serialize and deserialize swagger specifications.
- JsonPath: Json path is used in
the plugin external configuration file to define values for provider schema
properties that are coming from external files.
Authors
See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.