Version: 19.x (unreleased)

Run the Teleport Terraform Provider on a Server

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This guide demonstrates how to set up the Terraform provider for Teleport on a persistent Linux or macOS server.

This guide does not cover running the Terraform provider locally, or in temporary environments such as CI/CD and short-lived cloud VMs. If you are in one of those cases, please follow the dedicated guides:

This guide will setup Teleport Machine & Workload Identity on the server. Machine & Workload Identity provides identities to machines and services, rather than human users.

How it works

This setup relies on a Machine & Workload Identity daemon (tbot) to join the Teleport cluster, obtain and refresh credentials for the Terraform provider. The daemon stores its identity on the disk and refresh the terraform credentials, typically every 30 minutes.

Prerequisites

A running Teleport cluster. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.
The tctl and tsh clients.
Installing tctl and tsh clients
1. Determine the version of your Teleport cluster. The tctl and tsh clients must be at most one major version behind your Teleport cluster version. Send a GET request to the Proxy Service at /v1/webapi/find and use a JSON query tool to obtain your cluster version. Replace teleport.example.com:443 with the web address of your Teleport Proxy Service:
  - Mac/Linux
  - Windows - Powershell
  TELEPORT_DOMAIN=teleport.example.com:443
  TELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl -s https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/find | jq -r '.server_version')"
2. Follow the instructions for your platform to install tctl and tsh clients:
  - Mac
  - Windows - Powershell
  - Linux
  Download the signed macOS .pkg installer for Teleport, which includes the tctl and tsh clients:
  curl -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-${TELEPORT_VERSION?}.pkg
  In Finder double-click the pkg file to begin installation.
  danger
  Using Homebrew to install Teleport is not supported. The Teleport package in Homebrew is not maintained by Teleport and we can't guarantee its reliability or security.

Terraform >= 1.0.0+
```
terraform version
Terraform v1.0.0
```
Check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster and verify that you can run tctl and tsh commands using your current credentials.
1. Assign teleport.example.com to the domain name of the Teleport Proxy Service in your cluster and [email protected] to your Teleport username.
2. Authenticate to your Teleport cluster. This depends on whether your shell is interactive or not.
  
  In an interactive shell: Run the following command. By default, this triggers a multi-factor authentication prompt:
```
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  19.0.0-dev
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
```
  On non-interactive environments: If you are running tsh and tctl as an AI agent, in a CI/CD environment, or similar, make sure the TELEPORT_IDENTITY_FILE environment variable is assigned to a valid file path with credentials for your cluster. tsh and tctl read the file path from the environment variable and do not require a separate authentication step. If there is no identity file available, we recommend that you set up Machine ID to provision one automatically.
  
  When executing tctl commands with an identity file, you must pass the --auth-server flag to provide the Teleport Auth Service address, which is not included in the identity file. If you provide the Proxy Service address, tctl connects to the Proxy Service, which forwards traffic to and from the Teleport Auth Service. Update 443 to 3025 if you are contacting the Auth Service directly with tctl:
```
tctl status --auth-server=teleport.example.com:443
```
  For tsh commands that read an identity file, you must pass the --proxy flag, which points tsh to the address of the Teleport Proxy Service:
```
tsh status --proxy=teleport.example.com
```
  Ensure client commands can access your identity file. Replace path/to/identity/file with the path to your identity file:
```
export TELEPORT_IDENTITY_FILE="${TELEPORT_IDENTITY_FILE:-path/to/identity/file}"
```
  Add the --auth-server or --proxy flags to all subsequent tctl and tsh commands.
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.
A Linux host that you wish to run the Teleport Terraform provider onto.
A Linux user on that host that you wish Terraform and tbot to run as.
tbot installed on your server and joined to your Teleport cluster. Follow the tbot deployment guide for Linux.

Step 1/3. Configure RBAC

At this point, tbot is installed and configured on the machine that will run Terraform.

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 versions 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.

Use the tctl bots update command to add the role to the Bot. Replace example with the name of the Bot you created in the deployment guide.

tctl bots update example --add-roles terraform-provider

Step 2/3. Configure `tbot` output

Now, tbot needs to be configured with an output that will produce the credentials needed by the Terraform provider. As the Terraform provider will be accessing the Teleport API, the correct output type to use is identity.

For this guide, the directory destination will be used. This will write these credentials to a specified directory on disk. Ensure that this directory can be written to by the Linux user that tbot runs as, and that it can be read by the Linux user that Terraform will run as.

Modify your tbot configuration to add an identity output:

services:
- type: identity
  destination:
    type: directory
    # For this guide, /opt/machine-id is used as the destination directory.
    # You may wish to customize this. Multiple outputs cannot share the same
    # destination.
    path: /opt/machine-id

Apply your configuration. The command to execute depends on how you are running tbot.

If you are running tbot as a background service, execute the following command, which instructs tbot to reload its configuration:

sudo systemctl reload tbot

If you are running tbot in one-shot mode, before you attempt to access your target resource later, you must execute tbot, pointing it to the location of its configuration file (/etc/tbot.yaml in the example below):

tbot start -c /etc/tbot.yaml

You should now see an identity file under /opt/machine-id. This contains the private key and signed certificates needed by the Terraform provider to authenticate with the Teleport Auth Service.

Step 3/3. Run Terraform

Start by creating a new Terraform working directory:

mkdir ./my-terraform && cd ./my-terraform
terraform init

In order to configure the Teleport Terraform provider to use the credentials output by Machine & Workload Identity, we use the identity_file_path option.

In this directory, create main.tf:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    teleport = {
      version = "19.0.0-dev"
      source  = "terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport"
    }
  }
}

provider "teleport" {
  # Replace with the address of your Teleport Proxy or Auth Service.
  addr               = "teleport.example.com:443"
  # Replace with the directory configured in the identity output in the
  # previous step.
  identity_file_path = "/opt/machine-id/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" "terraform-test" {
  version = "v7"
  metadata = {
    name        = "terraform-test"
    description = "Example role created by Terraform"
  }

  spec = {
    # This role does nothing as it is an example role.
    allow = {}
  }
}

Replace teleport.example.com:443 with the address of your Teleport Proxy Service or Auth Service. If you modified the destination directory from /opt/machine-id, then this should also be replaced.

Now, execute Terraform to test the configuration:

terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

Check your Teleport cluster, ensuring the role has been created:

tctl get role/terraform-test

Next steps

Explore the Terraform provider resource reference to discover what can be configured with the Teleport Terraform provider.
Read the tbot configuration reference to explore all the available tbot configuration options.

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How it works​

Prerequisites​

Step 1/3. Configure RBAC​

Step 2/3. Configure tbot output​

Step 3/3. Run Terraform​

Next steps​