Welcome back to this series where we’re learning all about using Terraform and Resource Manager to manage your infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. In part 1, we learned the basics of Terraform that a developer needs to know to get started working with it. In part 2, we installed and ran our very first Terraform script. Part 3 took us into the cloud and we ran our first Terraform script with Resource Manager and we took it a step further in part 4 where we introduced variable input and validation in to the process with Resource Manager schema documents. In this post, we’re going to start wrapping up the series by talking about how we might distribute our Terraform Infrastructure as Code and how we can integrate Terraform and Resource Manager into our build process via our CI/CD pipeline. We’ll look specifically at GitHub and GitHub Actions, but certainly the process would be similar for other CI/CD tools. 

Adding a Workflow To Create a Distributable Stack With GitHub Actions

The first quick thing I want to cover in this post is creating a distributable stack from your Terraform scripts. Basically what that means is creating a .zip file that you can share with other developers so that they can run your script in their own tenancy. Certainly the archive can be used in your own tenancy, but, we’ll look at better solutions for that down below. Creating a zip with GitHub Actions is pretty easy, just add a YAML file in your repository in the directory .github/workflows and call it build-stack.yaml. 

The gist of this workflow is that every time a new ’tag’ version is pushed to GitHub, the workflow will:

  • Checkout the code

  • Zip everything in the root

  • Publish the zip as an artifact on GitHub

  • Create a GitHub release

  • Upload the published artifact as a release

Here’s the YAML file.

For my demo repo, I saved this file and tagged and pushed to GitHub. Once the job is complete, you can go to your “Releases” page for the repo and see that the zip has been published.

Tip:  Your latest releases are always found at https://github.com/[user name]/[repo name]/releases/latest.

Adding a “Deploy to Oracle Cloud” Button to Your Project

Now that you’ve got a nice zip that others can use, why not add a simple ‘Deploy to Oracle Cloud’ button to your README.md so that others can deploy your stack with one click? Just follow the format defined in the docs and paste the markup into your README.md.

Check out my repo for this blog post to see it in action at https://github.com/recursivecodes/oci-resource-manager-demo.

Summary

This was a quick, but I think important blog post in this Terraform series where we learned how to use GitHub Actions to create and publish a release asset and add a ‘Deploy to Oracle Cloud’ button to our GitHub repos. In the next post, we’ll look at how we can create our Resource Manager stacks and jobs in our pipeline and apply those jobs directly from our CI/CD workflow. 

Photo by Nazrin B-va on Unsplash