How to Store Terraform State in Azure Blob Storage: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Store Terraform State in Azure Blob Storage: A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction:

Terraform is an excellent tool for managing infrastructure as code, but handling the state files can be a challenge, especially in a team setting. Storing your Terraform state in Azure Blob Storage is a great way to centralize and manage your state files securely. In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll walk you through the process of setting up Azure Blob Storage for Terraform state, creating an example infrastructure, and storing it in the remote backend.

Prerequisites:

Before we dive in, you'll need a few things:

  1. An Azure account: If you don't have one, you can sign up for a free trial at https://azure.com.

  2. Terraform installed on your local machine: You can download it from https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html.

  3. Azure CLI installed and authenticated with your Azure account.

Step 1: Create an Azure Blob Storage Account:

  1. Log in to the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com).

  2. Click on "Create a resource."

  3. In the search bar, type "Storage Account" and select it from the results.

  4. Click the "Create" button.

  5. Fill out the required information, like Subscription, Resource group, Storage account name, and Location. Choose a unique name for your storage account.

  6. Leave the default settings for the other options, and click "Review + create" and then "Create" to create the storage account.

Step 2: Configure Terraform Backend:

  1. Open your Terraform configuration file (e.g., main.tf) in a text editor.

  2. Add the following block at the beginning of your configuration to configure the backend to use Azure Blob Storage:

     terraform {
       backend "azurerm" {
         resource_group_name   = "your-resource-group"
         storage_account_name  = "your-storage-account"
         container_name        = "your-container"
         key                   = "terraform.tfstate"
       }
     }
    

    Replace "your-resource-group", "your-storage-account", "your-container" with the appropriate values from your Azure Blob Storage account.

Step 3: Authenticate with Azure:

  1. Run az login in your terminal to log in to your Azure account.

  2. Follow the authentication prompts to complete the login process.

Step 4: Initialize Terraform:

  1. Navigate to your Terraform project directory in the terminal.

  2. Run terraform init to initialize the project. Terraform will configure the Azure Blob Storage backend based on the settings you provided in main.tf.

Step 5: Create an Example Infrastructure:

  1. In your Terraform configuration directory, create a new Terraform configuration file (e.g., example.tf) for your example infrastructure.

  2. Add some resource definitions to example.tf. For example, you can create a simple Azure Virtual Network:

     resource "azurerm_virtual_network" "example" {
       name                = "example-network"
       address_space       = ["10.0.0.0/16"]
       location            = "East US"
       resource_group_name = "your-resource-group"
     }
    

    Replace "your-resource-group" with the name of your Azure resource group.

  3. Run terraform init again to initialize the configuration for your example infrastructure.

Step 6: Apply Your Infrastructure:

  1. Run terraform apply to create the example infrastructure.

Terraform will create the resources defined in example.tf and store the state file in Azure Blob Storage.

Step 7: Accessing State Data:

If you need to access your Terraform state data or update the infrastructure later, you can use the following commands:

  • To view the current state of your infrastructure, you can run terraform show.

  • To apply changes to your infrastructure, modify the example.tf file, and then run terraform apply again.

Step 8 : Destroy Your Infrastructure and Cleanup:

If you want to destroy the example infrastructure and remove the state from Azure Blob Storage, follow these steps:

  1. Run terraform destroy to destroy the resources defined in example.tf.

  2. Run terraform init -reconfigure to reconfigure Terraform without the backend, effectively removing the state from Azure Blob Storage.

By following these steps, you've successfully configured Terraform to store its state in Azure Blob Storage, created an example infrastructure, and experienced how Terraform stores its state in the remote backend, making it easier to manage your infrastructure as code with improved collaboration and centralization. Happy Terraforming!