Ansible-Terraform-Trigger

This ansible playbook can be used to spin-up infra by triggering terraform scipts. This uses ansible's inbuilt terraform module.

Prerequisites

• Terraform Installed on Target Machine.
• Ansible 2.5+ ( 2.7+ to use Terraform's backend_config)

Usage

This playbook triggers a terraform script which creates an ec2-instance in a default VPC. This is an example that helps to understand how terraform variables can be referenced using Ansbile Vars. This can be a starting point for a long way to integrate much complex infrastructure with Ansible using Terraform.

Variables

VariableName	Significance
amiId	ami-Id of EC2 Instance
subnetId	Subnet-Id of EC2 Instance
ownerName	EC2 Instance Owner Tag
nameTag	EC2 Instance Name Tag
s3BackendBucket	Terraform S3 Backend Config
s3BackendKey	Terraform S3 Backend Bucket Key
s3BackendRegion	Terraform S3 Backend Region

Execution

This ansible playbook works loocally and update the hosts to work on remote machines. Make sure the machine/user has suitable permissions to execute terraform.

$ ansible-playbook tf-plan.yml

Another way to create terraform plan is to execute playbook using Check mode.

$ ansible-playbook tf-apply.yml --check

Execution with Jenkins

This ansible cookbook can be integrated with jenkins and automate the build process. The prerequisites for jenkins are.

• Install Ansible on jenkins machine locally.
• Install Ansible plugin and create global configuration for Ansible with executable path.
• Install Terraform on jenkins machine locally [on target machine].
• Install terraform plugin.
• Make sure jenkins user has permissions to execute ansible playbooks.

Create an new build job which invokes ansible-playbook which refers path to the ansible-playbook. Add additional variables if necessary which can be passed while command execution.

References

Ansible-Terraform Module Ansible Variables Terraform Variables Terraform Backend_Configuration