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Version: 16.x

Run the Teleport Terraform Provider with Long-Lived Credentials

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This guide explains you how to create a Terraform user and have the Teleport Auth Service sign long-lived credentials for it. The Teleport Terraform Provider can then user those credentials to interact with Teleport.

How it works​

A Teleport administrator defines a role for the Teleport Terraform provider, as well as a role that can impersonate the Terraform provider role. A Teleport user assumes the impersonator role and executes a tctl command to instruct the Teleport Auth Service to sign a user certificate for the Terraform provider. The provider then loads the certificate in order to authenticate to your Teleport cluster and manage resources on the Teleport Auth Service backend.

warning

Long-lived credentials are less secure than other Teleport credentials and their usage is discouraged.

You must protect and rotate the credentials as they hold full Teleport administrative access. You should prefer using tbot, native MachineID joining in CI or Cloud environments, or create temporary bots for local use when possible.

See the list of possible Terraform provider setups to find which one fits your use-case.

Long-lived credentials are not compatible with MFA for administrative actions (MFA4A) which is an additional security layer that protects Teleport in case of Identity Provider (IdP) compromise.

Prerequisites​

  • A running Teleport cluster version 16.5.18 or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

    Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

  • Terraform >= 1.0.0+

    terraform version
    Terraform v1.0.0

  • To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials.

    For example, run the following command, assigning teleport.example.com to the domain name of the Teleport Proxy Service in your cluster and [email protected] to your Teleport username:

    tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]
    tctl status
    Cluster  teleport.example.com
    Version  16.5.18
    CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678

    If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/3. Create Teleport credentials for Terraform​

Terraform needs a signed identity file from the Teleport cluster certificate authority to manage resources in the cluster. You will create a local Teleport user for this purpose.

  1. Create a folder called teleport-terraform to hold temporary files:

    mkdir -p teleport-terraform
    cd teleport-terraform

  2. Create a new file called terraform.yaml and open it in an editor.

  3. Configure settings for a local Teleport user and role by pasting the following content into the terraform.yaml file:

    kind: user
metadata:
  name: terraform
spec:
  roles: ['terraform-provider']
version: v2

    Starting with 16.2, Teleport comes with a built-in role for the Terraform provider: terraform-provider.

    RBAC for versions before v16.2

    On older version you will need to create the Terraform role yourself. Write the following role.yaml manifest:

    kind: role
version: v7
metadata:
  name: terraform-provider
spec:
  allow:
    db_labels:
      '*': '*'
    app_labels:
      '*': '*'
    node_labels:
      '*': '*'
    rules:
      - resources:
        - app
        - cluster_auth_preference
        - cluster_networking_config
        - db
        - device
        - github
        - login_rule
        - oidc
        - okta_import_rule
        - role
        - saml
        - session_recording_config
        - token
        - trusted_cluster
        - user
        - access_list
        - node
        verbs: ['list','create','read','update','delete']

    Use tctl create -f ./role.yaml to create the role.

    These settings configure a user and role named terraform with the permissions required to manage resources in your Teleport cluster.

  4. Create the terraform user and role by running the following command:

    tctl create terraform.yaml

    The terraform user can't sign in to get credentials, so you must have another user impersonate the terraform account to request a certificate.

  5. Create a new file called terraform-impersonator.yaml and open it in an editor.

  6. Configure a role that enables your user to impersonate the Terraform user by pasting the following content into the terraform-impersonator.yaml file:

    kind: role
version: v7
metadata:
  name: terraform-impersonator
spec:
  allow:
    # This impersonate role allows any user assigned to this role to impersonate
    # and generate certificates for the user named "terraform" with a role also
    # named "terraform".
    impersonate:
      users: ['terraform']
      roles: ['terraform']

  7. Create the terraform-impersonator role by running the following command:

    tctl create terraform-impersonator.yaml

  8. Assign the terraform-impersonator role to your Teleport user by running the appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

    1. Retrieve your local user's roles as a comma-separated list:

      ROLES=$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.roles | join(",")')

    2. Edit your local user to add the new role:

      tctl users update $(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') \  --set-roles "${ROLES?},terraform-impersonator"

    3. Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

  9. Request a signed identity file for the Terraform user by running the following command:

    tctl auth sign --user=terraform --out=terraform-identity

    After running this command, you have a terraform-identity file with credentials for the Terraform user.

Step 2/3. Prepare a Terraform configuration file​

To prepare a Terraform configuration file:

  1. Create a new file called main.tf and open it in an editor.

  2. Define an example user and role using Terraform by pasting the following content into the main.tf file, replacing teleport.example.com:443 with the host and port of the Teleport Proxy Service:

    terraform {
   required_providers {
      teleport = {
         source  = "terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport"
         version = "~> 16.0"
      }
   }
}

provider "teleport" {
   addr               = 'teleport.example.com:443'
   identity_file_path = "terraform-identity"
}

# We must create a test role, if we don't declare resources, Terraform won't try to
# connect to Teleport and we won't be able to validate the setup.
resource "teleport_role" "test" {
   version = "v7"
   metadata = {
      name        = "test"
      description = "Dummy role to validate Terraform Provider setup"
      labels = {
         test = "yes"
      }
   }

   spec = {}
}

Step 3/3. Apply the configuration​

To apply the configuration:

  1. Check the contents of the teleport-terraform folder:

    ls
    main.tf  terraform-identity  terraform-impersonator.yaml  terraform.yaml

  2. Initialize the working directory that contains Terraform configuration files by running the following command:

    terraform init
    Initializing the backend...
    Initializing provider plugins...- Finding terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport versions matching ...

  3. Execute the Terraform plan defined in the configuration file by running the following command:

    terraform apply
    Terraform used the selected providers to generate the following execution plan. Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:+ create
    Terraform will perform the following actions:
    teleport_role.test will be created
    + resource "teleport_role" "test" {   + id       = (known after apply)   + kind     = (known after apply)   + metadata = {      + name      = "test"      + namespace = (known after apply)        }   + spec     = {}   + version  = "v7"     }
    Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

Next steps​