GitHub Action Pipeline with Terraform State File in Azure Blob

In previous blog, we discussed how to do infrastructure automation while maintaining the Terraform state file in Terraform cloud. But, teams can maintain terraform state file in Azure portal along with  other resources. You can learn how to maintain terraform state file in azure blob in this blog.

You can create a resource group, storage account and container in azure to keep the terraform state file. Then add storage container details to Terraform script as follows.

Note the backend section of the provider.tf below which specifies the Azure blob storage and container to maintain the Terraform state. It is required to create the blob storage container manually before trying out the pipeline.

providers.tf

provider "azurerm" {

  #version = "~>2.0"

  subscription_id = "<<subscription id>>"

  features {}

}

terraform {

  required_providers {

    azurerm = {

      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"

      version = "=2.93.1"

    }

  }

  backend "azurerm" {

    resource_group_name  = "<<state file resource group name>>"

    storage_account_name = "<<storage account name>>"

    container_name       = "<<container name where state file store>>"

    key                  = "terraform.tfstate"

  }

}

Pipeline YAML file can be changed as follows.

name: 'Terraform'

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  terraform:
    name: 'Terraform'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      ARM_CLIENT_ID: ${{ secrets.AZURE_AD_CLIENT_ID }}
      ARM_CLIENT_SECRET: ${{ secrets.AZURE_AD_CLIENT_SECRET }}
      ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID: ${{ secrets.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}
      ARM_TENANT_ID: ${{ secrets.AZURE_AD_TENANT_ID }}


    steps:
    # Checkout the repository to the GitHub Actions runner
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      

    # Initialize a new or existing Terraform working directory by creating initial files, loading any remote state, downloading modules, etc.
    - name: Terraform Init
      run: terraform init


    # Generates an execution plan for Terraform
    - name: Terraform Plan
      run: terraform plan

    # deploy resources
    - name: Terraform Apply
      run: terraform apply -auto-approve

This blog explained how to maintain terraform state file in azure blob storage.