Vultr Terraform Guide

Terraform#

Terraform within the strapi-vultr-deploy template does the following:

  1. Uses the vultr/vultr and cloudflare/cloudflare providers
  2. Creates a DB Instance (Default type is vc2-2c-4gb) ~20$/month
  3. Creates a Strapi Instance (Default type is vc2-1c-2gb) ~10$/month
  4. Deploys a user provided SSH key to both instances
  5. Registers an A record for the Strapi instance on a subdomain in Cloudflare
  6. Automatically outputs an Ansible inventory file to the proper directory
  7. Automatically outputs an Ansible vars file to the proper directory

Terraform Requirements#

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You should have already configured Terraform, see the variables section before proceeding.

  • Vultr API Key
  • Cloudflare email
  • Cloudflare API Key
  • Cloudflare Zone ID for Domain
  • Have a subdomain in mind (example: api-test)
  • Have an SSH public key (Doesn't currently support existing keys, yet)
  • Terraform already installed

Terraform Instructions#

  1. Ensure you have configured the terraform.tfvars file per the variables guide
  2. Navigate to the terraform directory and run terraform init (This will install the required providers
  3. Run terraform plan --out plan.txt to get a summery of what terraform will do
  4. If the plan looks good run terraform apply plan.txt and it will ask you to confirm, type yes
  5. Let Terraform do it's thing, this might take a few minutes
  6. Validate that Terraform created the ./ansible/inventory file
  7. Validate that Terraform created the ./ansible/tf_vars/tf_vars.yml file

Congrats, you just spun up the infrastructure, move on to Ansible to install the services and deploy your application.

Optional Modifications#

Below are some optional modifications you can make to your Terraform configuration for more secure storage.

Remote tfstate storage#

The .tfstate file is extremely important to Terraform as it maintains the state information of the deployed infrastructure. While it is possible to regenerate this file (not a fun task), you must keep this file safe as it contains sensitive information. Terraform has some great backend provider documentation for things like:

If you are interested in using Consul, they also currently have a free beta going on for their Consul Cloud.

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