Best practices for modules and reusage

Terraform
1

Dear all,

I’m new with Terraform and therefore took time to go through the . documentation and several threads but unfortunately I’m still missing a piece about modules’ structure and configuration.

I’m currently starting a build several configurations and try to structure them the best way possible.

Basically I’m using Terraform for both AWS and OCI. To do so I created a folder dedicated to Terraform with 2 subfolders (AWS and OCI). I will put all modules for AWS in the first one and the modules for OCI in the second one.

Beside, I’m trying to follow the principle of having a main.tf as well as a tfvars file for the variables and an outputs.tf.

As I’m going to have different kind of configuration such as Reporting, Deploy workshop, Deploy PaaS my idea is to have a structure like the following:

Terraform
|
|----> AWS
|----> OCI
        |-----> Reporting
        |-----> Deploy_workshop
                   |-----> main.tf
                   |-----> outputs.tf
                   |-----> variables.tfvars

The first question is does it make sense the organise things like that?

While setting this up, I went in the documentation about modules and calling child modules as there will be some common commands that could be mutualised between the projects.

Here the first challenge I do not get working is to configure the provider only once and not in each “project”.

I have the following for the provider:

provider "oci" {
  tenancy_ocid = var.tenancy_ocid
  user_ocid = var.user_ocid
  fingerprint = var.fingerprint
  private_key_path = var.private_key_path
  region = var.region
}

and stored it directly under teh OCI folder.

Now in the main.tf of the reporting “project” for instance, I tried to call the provider as a module:

module "oci" {
                source = ".."
}

I tried several values for the source but I always get an error saying unknown module “oci”.

Any idea how I could configure / define my provider only once and then call it in my different projects??

Many thanks for your support!

David

2

The provider configuration is rather flexible. I pass a provider implicitly from shell environment variables.

The module source is also flexible. In your case, try the full path from where you run terraform to the module’s directory.

3

Hi Robert,

thanks for your reply!

I tried with the environment variables and it works. In the second solution by calling a module is works if I put the absolute path to the module.

Thanks

David