Terraform

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We’ve got some stuff going on at work using Terraform, or Terrahawks as I like to call it, so I figured it was about time I had a play with it. I probably won’t be doing much of the project work myself, but I like to understand a bit about all the things we do.

I have previously blogged about the use of Terraform data sources to fetch information concerning Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources. The documentation is pretty good, but sometimes you may want to know more about the data returned. This post describes a potential way to debug output of a data source and to evaluate interpolations.

Do you know Data::Dumper?

Perl is one of the programming languages I have worked with in the past. When I did (it really was a long time ago) there wasn’t a proper IDE allowing me to have nice breakpoints and inspect variables so I resorted to the good, old Data::Dumper. It worked pretty much everywhere and showed me the contents of complex data structures when I was a bit at a loss. For example:

This post is a direct follow up to the previous one where I shared how I used a Terraform data source to fetch the latest Oracle-provided Oracle Linux 7 cloud image identifier. This time around I’d like to fetch the latest Oracle Cloud ID (OCID) for Oracle Linux 8. It’s a different approach and instead of a single article covering both Oracle Linux versions I decided to use a more the search-engine friendly method of splitting the topics.

Terraform versions

I’m still using Terraform 0.14.5/OCI provider 4.10.0.

As with all cloud providers you need to specify an operating system image when creating virtual machines using Terraform in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This can either be an Oracle supplied image, or a custom image you built. This post describes how to fetch the most recent Oracle-provided image for Oracle Linux 7 in Terraform. I am planning another post for Oracle Linux 8 in the future.

Terraform versions

When writing this post Terraform 0.14.5 was the latest and greatest release. The terraform init command downloaded release 4.10.0 of the OCI provider.