Run the Teleport Terraform Provider on Terraform Cloud

This guide demonstrates how to use the Terraform provider for Teleport using HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise.

This guide does not cover running the Terraform provider locally, in other CI/CD environments, or in short-lived cloud VMs. In any of these cases, refer to a dedicated guide:

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

How it works

When running the Teleport Terraform provider on Terraform Cloud, you can use its built-in Machine ID support to dynamically authenticate to your Teleport cluster without any shared secrets. When run in this configuration, the Terraform provider proves its identity to the Teleport Auth Service using Terraform Cloud's Workload Identity tokens.

While following this guide, you'll configure your Teleport cluster to accept join requests from Terraform Cloud runs and configure the provider to authenticate using the Terraform Cloud join method.

Note that this guide applies to both the public HCP Terraform a.k.a. Terraform Cloud, as well as self-hosted Terraform Enterprise. This does not apply to Terraform or OpenTofu when run on other CI/CD platforms like Spacelift, so refer to our generic CI and Cloud guide to configure the provider in these environments.

Prerequisites

• A running Teleport cluster. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial.

• The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

  Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

• 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.

• Terraform >= 1.0.0+

  terraform version
  Terraform v1.0.0

  To import existing Teleport resources as Terraform resources, you must have Terraform version v1.5.0 or above.

• An account and project on either the public Terraform Cloud SaaS or a Terraform Enterprise instance

• The Teleport Terraform provider, v16.4.0 or later

Step 1/4: Configure Terraform Cloud joining in Teleport

To start, the Teleport Auth Service needs to be configured to accept join requests from Terraform Cloud runs. We'll do this by creating a bot named terraform which the Teleport Terraform provider will use in a later step.

kind: bot
version: v1
metadata:
  name: terraform
spec:
  # The terraform-provider role is a built-in role granting access to every
  # resource supported by the terraform provider.
  roles: ["terraform-provider"]

Create the bot from the new YAML manifest:

tctl create -f terraform_bot.yaml
bot 'terraform' has been created

Next, the new bot needs to be allowed to authenticate with Terraform Cloud Workload Identity credentials. Create a file named terraform_token.yaml with this content, depending on whether you are using Terraform Cloud or self-hosted Terraform Enterprise:

kind: token
version: v2
metadata:
  name: terraform
spec:
  roles: [Bot]
  join_method: terraform_cloud
  bot_name: terraform
  terraform_cloud:
    allow:
      - organization_name: ExampleOrganization
        project_name: example-project
        workspace_name: example-workspace

kind: token
version: v2
metadata:
  name: terraform
spec:
  roles: [Bot]
  join_method: terraform_cloud
  bot_name: terraform
  terraform_cloud:
    hostname: terraform.example.com
    allow:
      - organization_name: ExampleOrganization
        project_name: example-project
        workspace_name: example-workspace

This token, named terraform, allows Terraform Cloud runs to authenticate with Teleport when all 3 of the values allowed in the token match those of the job run by Terraform Cloud.

Make sure to replace the organization, project, and workspace names to match your Terraform Cloud project or projects. If desired, the fields organization_id, project_id, and workspace_id can be used as well to specify exact resource IDs. The values must exactly match those shown in the Terraform Cloud dashboard.

Note that each allow rule must specify at least an organization_name or organization_id, and at least one other option (workspace and/or project). If desired, all workspaces under a project can be allowed by leaving workspace_name (or workspace_id) unset. You can specify as many allow rules as you want, and at least one must match for a run to be able to join.

Once finished, create the token:

tctl create -f terraform_token.yaml
token 'terraform' has been created

Step 2/4: Configure Terraform Cloud to issue Workload Identity tokens

Terraform Cloud needs to be configured to issue JWTs during runs. This only requires that an environment variable is set in the Terraform Cloud dashboard. To do so:

1. Navigate to https://app.terraform.io/
2. Navigate to your desired organization, project, and workspace
3. From the workspace sidebar, select "Variables"
4. Under "Workspace Variables", click the "Add variable" button
5. Select the "Environment variable" ("env") category
6. For the key, enter: TFC_WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_AUDIENCE_TELEPORT
7. For the value, enter your Teleport cluster name. If using Teleport Enterprise (Cloud), this would look like example.teleport.sh.
8. If desired, enter a description. For example, "Workload identity token request for Teleport"

The end result should look like this:

Once this variable is set, all subsequent runs in this workspace will be issued JWTs with the audience configured in the variable value, i.e. example.teleport.sh as shown here.

Step 3/4: Configure the Terraform Provider

In your provider.tf or similar, configure the teleport provider:

provider "teleport" {
  addr = "example.teleport.sh:443"
  join_method = "terraform_cloud"
  join_token = "terraform"
  audience_tag = "teleport"
}

These parameters must be set:

• addr should match the public hostname and port of your Teleport cluster
• join_method should be terraform_cloud. Note that Terraform Enterprise also uses the same join method, with a hostname as configured in Step 1.
• join_token should match the name of the token resource created in Step #2
• audience_tag should match the suffix on the key of the variable created in the Terraform Cloud dashboard. For example, given the variable key TFC_WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_AUDIENCE_TELEPORT, the audience tag should be teleport.

Be sure to remove any preexisting identity_file_path; it is replaced by join_method and join_token.

For a complete example, consider this minimal provider.tf:

terraform {
  cloud {
    organization = "ExampleOrganization"

    workspaces {
      name = "example-workspace"
    }
  }

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

provider "teleport" {
  addr = "example.teleport.sh:443"
  join_method = "terraform_cloud"
  join_token = "terraform"
  audience_tag = "teleport"
}

resource "teleport_role" "test" {
  version = "v7"
  metadata = {
    name        = "test"
    description = "Dummy role to validate Terraform Provider setup"
    labels = {
      test = "yes"
    }
  }
}

Step 4/4: Run Terraform

You should now be able to perform a Terraform plan or apply. All types of triggers should work, including CLI, API, and Git, so long as the run is coordinated by Terraform Cloud.

Assuming your local terraform is authenticated to Terraform Cloud, try:

terraform plan

The workflow should successfully execute, depending on your Terraform configuration.

Troubleshooting

Extracting a JWT for debugging purposes

If you need to view a JWT sample for debugging purposes, you can create a null_resource that prints the JWT for the run:

resource "null_resource" "print_token" {
  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "echo TFC_WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_TOKEN_TELEPORT: $TFC_WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_TOKEN_TELEPORT"
  }
}

Once applied, you should see the encoded JWT printed in your Terraform log. These values can be decoded either by hand or with any number of tools, for example jwt-cli.

Note that these JWTs are generally valid for 2 hours and can potentially be used to authenticate to your Teleport cluster, so this value should be treated with care. The full encoded token should not be shared.

This may be useful for determining the exact issuer (iss) value needed to configure Terraform Enterprise join tokens, or if you need to request support.