Run the Teleport Terraform Provider on a Server

This guide demonstrates how to set up the Terraform provider for Teleport on a persistent Linux or macOS server.

This guide does not cover running the Terraform provider locally, or in temporary environments such as CI/CD and short-lived cloud VMs. If you are in one of those cases, please follow the dedicated guides:

• Run the Terraform Provider in CI or cloud VMs
• Run the Terraform Provider locally

This guide will setup MachineID on the server. MachineID is Teleport's feature for providing identities to machines and services, rather than users.

How it works

This setup relies on a MachineID daemon (tbot) to join the Teleport cluster, obtain and refresh credentials for the Terraform provider. The daemon stores its identity on the disk and refresh the terraform credentials, typically every 30 minutes.

Prerequisites

• A running Teleport cluster version 16.4.8 or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.

• The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

  Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

• Terraform >= 1.0.0+

  terraform version
  Terraform v1.0.0

• To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials.

  For example:

  tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
  tctl status
  Cluster  teleport.example.com
  Version  16.4.8
  CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678

  If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

• A Linux host that you wish to run the Teleport Terraform provider onto.

• A Linux user on that host that you wish Terraform and tbot to run as. In the guide, we will use teleport for this.

Step 1/4. Install tbot on your server

You must install tbot and make it join the Teleport cluster. To do so, follow the tbot deployment guide for Linux until step 3.

Step 2/4. Configure RBAC

At this point, tbot is installed and configured on the machine that will run Terraform.

Starting with 16.2, Teleport comes with a built-in role for the Terraform provider: terraform-provider.

kind: role
version: v7
metadata:
  name: terraform-provider
spec:
  allow:
    db_labels:
      '*': '*'
    app_labels:
      '*': '*'
    node_labels:
      '*': '*'
    rules:
      - resources:
        - app
        - cluster_auth_preference
        - cluster_networking_config
        - db
        - device
        - github
        - login_rule
        - oidc
        - okta_import_rule
        - role
        - saml
        - session_recording_config
        - token
        - trusted_cluster
        - user
        - access_list
        - node
        verbs: ['list','create','read','update','delete']

Use the tctl bots update command to add the role to the Bot. Replace example with the name of the Bot you created in the deployment guide.

tctl bots update example --add-roles terraform-provider

Step 3/4. Configure tbot output

Now, tbot needs to be configured with an output that will produce the credentials needed by the Terraform provider. As the Terraform provider will be accessing the Teleport API, the correct output type to use is identity.

For this guide, the directory destination will be used. This will write these credentials to a specified directory on disk. Ensure that this directory can be written to by the Linux user that tbot runs as, and that it can be read by the Linux user that Terraform will run as.

Modify your tbot configuration to add an identity output:

outputs:
- type: identity
  destination:
    type: directory
    # For this guide, /opt/machine-id is used as the destination directory.
    # You may wish to customize this. Multiple outputs cannot share the same
    # destination.
    path: /opt/machine-id

If operating tbot as a background service, restart it. If running tbot in one-shot mode (which creates credentials and ends the process, rather than running a background process), it must be executed before you attempt to execute the Terraform plan later.

You should now see an identity file under /opt/machine-id. This contains the private key and signed certificates needed by the Terraform provider to authenticate with the Teleport Auth Server.

Step 4/4. Run Terraform

Start by creating a new Terraform working directory:

mkdir ./my-terraform && cd ./my-terraform
terraform init

In order to configure the Teleport Terraform provider to use the credentials output by Machine ID, we use the identity_file_path option.

In this directory, create main.tf:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    teleport = {
      version = "16.4.8"
      source  = "terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport"
    }
  }
}

provider "teleport" {
  # Replace with the address of your Teleport Proxy or Auth Server.
  addr               = "teleport.example.com:443"
  # Replace with the directory configured in the identity output in the
  # previous step.
  identity_file_path = "/opt/machine-id/identity"
}

# We must create a test role, if we don't declare resources, Terraform won't try to
# connect to Teleport and we won't be able to validate the setup.
resource "teleport_role" "terraform-test" {
  version = "v7"
  metadata = {
    name        = "terraform-test"
    description = "Example role created by Terraform"
  }

  spec = {
    # This role does nothing as it is an example role.
    allow = {}
  }
}

Replace teleport.example.com:443 with the address of your Teleport Proxy or Auth Server. If you modified the destination directory from /opt/machine-id, then this should also be replaced.

Now, execute Terraform to test the configuration:

terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

Check your Teleport cluster, ensuring the role has been created:

tctl get role/terraform-test

Next steps

• Explore the Terraform provider resource reference to discover what can be configured with the Teleport Terraform provider.
• Read the tbot configuration reference to explore all the available tbot configuration options.