Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure as Code Quickstart

What you need

• Github Account
• Travis Account for Continuous Integration and Delivery
• Terraform installed for local testing

Remote Storage

A first draft from a working but not yet production ready version you can find here: https://github.com/ellerbrock/terraform-consul-backend

In this setup we could make a initial bootstraping of the account, setup a Consul Cluster and then import the Remote State to there, even with locking support.

Configuration

1.) Activate Travis for the Repository

2.) Go to Travis Repository Settings

Under General i have my Settings that:

• ON: Building only if .travis.yml is present
• ON: Build branch updates
• ON: Limit concurrent jobs? 1
• OFF: Build pull request updates

3.) Add your Credentials to Environment Variables

The Terraform Alicloud Provider Plugin expect the Environment Variables named like these:

• ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY="your-key-here"
• ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY="your-secret-here"
• ALICLOUD_REGION="your-region"

Ensure to disable the Display value in build log

You can read in more detail about this here.

4.) Add .travis.yml to your Repo

For a clean and isolated work i choose the Docker service for Travis CI. We run terraform with the official lightweight Alpine Linux Image hashicorp/terraform:light for the provisioning.

Ensure to have all your commands which needs access to the encrypted environment variables from travis in the before_script, for whatever weird reason after you can't access them anymore e.g. via script. I hope this get's updated in the future.

sudo: required

language: bash

dist: trusty

group: deprecated-2017Q4

services:
  - docker

cache:
  directories:
    - ".terraform"

env:
  - TRAVIS_SECURE_ENV_VARS=true

before_script:
  - docker pull hashicorp/terraform:light
  - docker run -e "ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY=${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY=${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_REGION=${ALICLOUD_REGION}" -v $(pwd):/x/ -w /x/ hashicorp/terraform:light init
  - docker run -e "ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY=${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY=${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_REGION=${ALICLOUD_REGION}" -v $(pwd):/x/ -w /x/ hashicorp/terraform:light validate
  - docker run -e "ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY=${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY=${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_REGION=${ALICLOUD_REGION}" -v $(pwd):/x/ -w /x/ hashicorp/terraform:light plan
  - docker run -e "ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY=${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY=${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}" -e "ALICLOUD_REGION=${ALICLOUD_REGION}" -v $(pwd):/x/ -w /x/ hashicorp/terraform:light apply -auto-approve

notifications:
  email:
    on_success: never
    on_failure: always

5.) Add your Terraform Code

In this example i create for the test a VPC.

main.tf

# Terraform Provider Alicloud expects these Variables:
#
# ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY
# ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY
# ALICLOUD_REGION
#
# Store them as environment variables in Travis for the Repository.

provider "alicloud" {
  access_key = "${var.access_key}"
  secret_key = "${var.secret_key}"
  region     = "${var.region}"
}

resource "alicloud_vpc" "vpc" {
  name       = "${var.vpc_name}"
  cidr_block = "${var.vpc_cidr_block}"
}

variables.tf

~/d/c/a/alibaba-cloud-terraform-github-travis ❯❯❯ cat variables.tf.old
variable "access_key" {
  description = "aws access key"
  default     = ""
}

variable "secret_key" {
  description = "aws secret key"
  default     = ""
}

variable "region" {
  description = "default region"
  default     = "eu-central-1"
}

variable "vpc_name" {
  description = "vpc name"
  default     = "default"
}

variable "vpc_cidr_block" {
  description = "default vpc cidr"
  default     = "192.168.0.0/16"
}

Links

• Terraform Alicloud Provider Docs
• Terraform Registry for Alicloud

Alicloud Terraform Examples

• https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-alicloud/
• https://github.com/alibaba/terraform-provider/tree/master/terraform/examples

Support

You can get direct support for my Open Source projects on Alibaba Cloud here

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License

This work by Maik Ellerbrock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and the underlying source code is licensed under the MIT license.