Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

When using tf most of times you need to reuse your Infrastructure as Code, and so your code should be written in such way. In my (very simple) use-case, I need to reuse user-data for cloud-init to setup different VMs but I do not want to rewrite basic/common things every time. Luckily, we can use the template_file.

user-data.yml

In the below yaml file, you will see that we are using tf string-template to produce hostname with this variable:

"${hostname}"

here is the file:

#cloud-config

disable_root: true
ssh_pwauth: no

users:
  - name: ebal
    ssh_import_id:
      - gh:ebal
    shell: /bin/bash
    sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

# Set TimeZone
timezone: Europe/Athens

hostname: "${hostname}"

# Install packages
packages:
  - mlocate
  - figlet

# Update/Upgrade & Reboot if necessary
package_update: true
package_upgrade: true
package_reboot_if_required: true

# Remove cloud-init
runcmd:
  - figlet "${hostname}" > /etc/motd
  - updatedb

Variables

Let’s see our tf variables:

$ cat Variables.tf

variable "hcloud_token" {
    description = "Hetzner Access API token"
    default = ""
}
variable "gandi_api_token" {
    description = "Gandi API token"
    default = ""
}
variable "domain" {
    description = " The domain name "
    default = "example.org"
}

Terraform Template

So we need to use user-data.yml as a template and replace hostname with var.domain

$ cat example.tf

Two simple steps:

• First we read user-data.yml as template and replace hostname with var.domain
• Then we render the template result to user_data as string

provider "hcloud" {
  token = "${var.hcloud_token}"
}

data "template_file" "userdata" {
  template = "${file("user-data.yml")}"
  vars = {
    hostname  = "${var.domain}"
  }
}

resource "hcloud_server" "node1" {
  name = "node1"
  image = "ubuntu-18.04"
  server_type = "cx11"
  user_data = "${data.template_file.userdata.rendered}"
}

$ terraform version
Terraform v0.12.3

And that’s it !