How to setup terraform for Azure

2-minute read

Table Of Contents

To setup terraform for Azure, you need to define the terraform and provider resources: 
terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.4.1"
  required_providers {
    azurerm = {
      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"
      version = "=3.0.0"
    }
  }
}
 
provider "azurerm" {
  subscription_id = var.subscription_id
  skip_provider_registration = true
  features {}
}

Setting the skip_provider_registration to true in the Azure provider means that the user must authenticate into Azure beforehand. This works for running terraform plan/applies manually from our local machines. When we want to run terraform plan/applies automatically in a CI server (e.g. with jenkins and atlantis) we will want to look into using a Service Principal or Managed Service Identity.

Next you will want to login to Azure with the Azure CLI tool. You can install it via brew: 

brew update && brew install azure-cli

And login with the following: 

az login

This will open a window in your web browser like below:

Select your account and you should be logged in. You will see an output like this: 

[
  {
    "cloudName": "AzureCloud",
    "id": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
    "isDefault": true,
    "name": "PAYG Subscription",
    "state": "Enabled",
    "tenantId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
    "user": {
      "name": "user@example.com",
      "type": "user"
    }
  }
]

You can see a list of subscriptions you have access to by running: 

az account list

If you have access to multiple subscriptions, select which one you want to authenticate into with: 

az account set --subscription="SUBSCRIPTION_ID"