terraform-provider-remote

README

Terraform Provider

The remote terraform provider allows provisionning configuration management resource to remote hosts. This is the equivalent of the local terraform provider, but that works across ssh.

The idea was that traditional configuration management tools were lacking important features that terraform has. In particular the tfstate is a great feature that allows to rollback the deployment to its initial state. With configuration management tools, the only source of truth is your code and when you modify it, some resources created from previous executions might be left over, creating some unclean state.

This provider works by connecting via SSH to the remote host, starting bash and running an internative bash script. The remote host must be equipped with standard unix tools:

• bash
• base64
• cat
• chmod

Future versions of this provider might use other ways to perform actions on the remote host, such as using SFTP features of the SSH protocol (but this prevents using sudo) or using another interpreter.

Example use of this provider to provision a file on a remote host:

provider "remote" {
}

data "remote_ssh_connection" "host" {
  host = "hostname.example.org"
  user = "username"
}

resource "remote_file" "test" {
  conn = data.remote_ssh_connection.host.conn
  filename = "/tmp/test-remote.txt"
  content  = "test from terraform"
}

Requirements

• Terraform 0.10.x
• Go 1.11 (to build the provider plugin)

Building The Provider

Run make build outside GOPATH or with GO111MODULE=on

Using the provider

Place the terraform-provider-remote executable in ~/.terraform.d/plugins

You can do so with make user-install

See: https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/providers.html#third-party-plugins

Developing the Provider

If you wish to work on the provider, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (version 1.11+ is required). You'll also need to correctly setup a GOPATH, as well as adding $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH.

To compile the provider, run make build. This will build the provider and put the provider binary in the $GOPATH/bin directory.

$ make bin
...
$ $GOPATH/bin/terraform-provider-remote
...

In order to test the provider, you can simply run make test.

$ make test

In order to run the full suite of Acceptance tests, run make testacc.

Note: Acceptance tests create real resources, and often cost money to run.

$ make testacc