Terraform is all the rage on the DevOps world now, and we decided to take a look. In general, Terraform is written in Go, but it uses a pretty nifty plugins system to work with additional providers. A terraform provider is an executable that you run, but it communicates with the terraform controller using gRPC.

What happens is that Terraform will invoke the executable, and then communicate with it over gRPC whose details are provided in the standard output. That means that you don’t need to write in Go, any language will do. Indeed, Samuel Fisher did all the hard work in making it possible. Please note that this post likely makes no sense if you didn’t read Samuel’s post first.

However, his work assumes that you are running on Linux, and there are a few minor issues that you have to deal with in order to get everything working properly.

For safety, Terraform uses TLS for communication, and ensures that the data is safe in transit. The provider will usually generate a self signed key and provide the public key on the standard output. I would like to understand what the security model they are trying to protect from, but at any rate, that method should be fairly safe against anything that I can think of. The problem is that there is an issue with the way the C# Terraform provider from Samuel handle the certificate in Windows. I sent a pull request to resolve it, it’s just a few lines, and it quite silly.

The next challenge is how to make Terraform actually execute your provider. The suggestion by Samuel is to copy the data to where Terraform will cache it, and use that. I don’t really like that approach, to be honest, and it looks like there are better options.

You can save a %APPDATA%\terraform.rc file with the following content:

This will ensure that your provider will be loaded from the local directory, instead of fetched over the network. Finally, there is another challenge, Terraform expects the paths and names to match, which can be quite annoying for development.

I had to run the following code to get it working:

cp F:\TerraformPluginDotNet\samples\SampleProvider\bin\release\net5.0\win-x64\publish\* F:\terraform\providers\example.com\example\dotnetsample\1.0.0\windows_amd64
mv F:\terraform\providers\example.com\example\dotnetsample\1.0.0\windows_amd64\SampleProvider.exe F:\terraform\providers\example.com\example\dotnetsample\1.0.0\windows_amd64\terraform-provider-dotnetsample.exe

What this does is ensure that the files are in the right location with the right name for Terraform to execute it. From there on, you can go on as usual developing your provider.