Deploy the solution using Terraform

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

In this tutorial, you will use a sample configuration to provision a Kubernetes cluster, and, a Postgres database. Finish by deleting all of the resources created by the configuration.

Install Terraform and the IBM Cloud provider

1. Download and install Terraform for your system. https://learn.hashicorp.com/terraform/getting-started/install.html

2. Check Terraform installation by running terraform in your terminal or command prompt window. You should see a list of Common commands.

3. Download the appropriate IBM Cloud Provider plugin for your system and extract the archive. https://github.com/IBM-Cloud/terraform-provider-ibm/releases

4. To setup Terraform with IBM Cloud provider, refer to this link

5. Create a .terraformrc file in your home directory that points to the Terraform binary. In the following example, $HOME/.terraform.d/plugins is the route to the directory.

    # ~/.terraformrc
    providers {
      ibm = "$HOME/.terraform.d/plugins/terraform-provider-ibm_v0.15.1"
    }
   

   Note: Update the provider version according to the release you use.

Set Platform API key

1. Go to the terraform folder

    cd terraform
   

2. Terraform must initialize the provider before it can be used.

    terraform init
   

3. Verify the terraform provider is installed

    terraform providers
   

   Output:

    .
    └── provider.ibm
   

4. Copy terraform/credentials.tfvars.tmpl to terraform/credentials.tfvars by running the below command

    cp terraform/credentials.tfvars.tmpl terraform/credentials.tfvars
   

5. Edit terraform/credentials.tfvars and set the value for ibmcloud_api_key to the Platform API key you obtained.

6. To provision the cluster, the terraform needs your Infrastructure API. To do so, go to https://cloud.ibm.com/iam#/users

7. Select the User

8. Scroll down to API Keys

9. Select the Classic infrastructure API key - To see your classic infrastructure API key details, select Details in the Options menu.

Provision a Kubernetes cluster

1. Perform a dry run to show what infrastructure terraform intends to create

    terraform plan
   

   You can activate debug log by running: export TF_LOG=debug

2. Start provisioning

    terraform apply
    terraform apply -target=ibm_container_cluster.cluster
   

3. Once provisioned, reads and outputs a Terraform state or plan file in a human-readable form.

    terraform show
   

4. Clean up

    terraform destroy
   

Resources

For additional resources pay close attention to the following:

• Tutorial: Deploy a LAMP stack using Terraform
• Tutorial: Plan, create and update deployment environments