Install Consul-Terraform-Sync

Refer to the introduction tutorial for details about installing, configuring, and running Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) on your local machine with the Terraform driver.

Install Consul-Terraform-Sync

To install CTS, find the appropriate package for your system and download it as a zip archive. For the CTS Enterprise binary, download a zip archive with the +ent metadata. CTS Enterprise requires a Consul Enterprise license to run.

Unzip the package to extract the binary named consul-terraform-sync. Move the consul-terraform-sync binary to a location available on your PATH.

Example:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
$ mv ./consul-terraform-sync /usr/local/bin/consul-terraform-sync

Once installed, verify the installation works by prompting the -version or -help option. The version outputted for the CTS Enterprise binary includes the +ent metadata.

$ consul-terraform-sync -version

Install and run CTS as a Docker container.

For the CTS Enterprise, use the Docker image hashicorp/consul-terraform-sync-enterprise.

$ docker pull hashicorp/consul-terraform-sync

Once installed, verify the installation works by prompting the -version or -help option. The version outputted for the CTS Enterprise image includes the +ent metadata.

$ docker run --rm hashicorp/consul-terraform-sync -version

The CTS OSS binary is available in the HashiCorp tap, which is a repository of all our Homebrew packages.

$ brew tap hashicorp/tap
$ brew install hashicorp/tap/consul-terraform-sync

Run the following command to update to the latest version:

$ brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/consul-terraform-sync

Once installed, verify the installation works by prompting the -version or -help option.

$ consul-terraform-sync -version

Clone the repository from GitHub hashicorp/consul-terraform-sync to build and install the CTS OSS binary in your path $GOPATH/bin. Building from source requires git and Golang.

$ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-terraform-sync.git
$ cd consul-terraform-sync
$ git checkout tags/<vX.Y.Z>
$ go install

Once installed, verify the installation works by prompting the -version or -help option.

$ consul-terraform-sync -version

Connect your Consul Cluster

CTS connects with your Consul cluster in order to monitor the Consul catalog for service changes. These service changes lead to downstream updates to your network devices. You can configure your Consul cluster in CTS with the Consul block. Below is an example:

consul {
  address = "localhost:8500"
  token   = "my-consul-acl-token"
}

Connect your Network Device

CTS interacts with your network device through a network driver. For the Terraform network driver, CTS uses Terraform providers to make changes to your network infrastructure resources. You can reference existing provider docs on the Terraform Registry to configure each provider or create a new Terraform provider.

Once you have identified a Terraform provider for all of your network devices, you can configure them in CTS with a terraform_provider block for each network device. Below is an example:

terraform_provider "fake-firewall" {
  address  = "10.10.10.10"
  username = "admin"
  password = "password123"
}

This provider is then used by task(s) to execute a Terraform module that will update the related network device.

Multiple Instances per Provider

You might have multiple instances of the same type of network device; for example, multiple instances of a firewall or load balancer. You can configure each instance with its own provider block and distinguish it by the alias meta-argument. See multiple provider configurations for more details and an example of the configuration.