How to Create a Storage Bucket with Terraform

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Purpose: Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. In this article, you will learn how to Create a Storage Bucket with Terraform on Google Cloud Platform.

Technical difficulty:

What are Storage Buckets?

Storage Buckets are the basic data storage containers. Everything you keep in Cloud Storage must be kept in a bucket. Buckets can be used to organize data and control access to it, but unlike directories and folders, you cannot nest buckets. While the number of buckets in a project or location is not limited, the rate at which they can be created or deleted is.

When you create a bucket, you assign it a globally unique name as well as a geographic location where the bucket and its contents will be stored. The bucket's name and location cannot be changed after it is created, but you can delete and recreate it to achieve a similar result.

Lab Scenario

We have set up the below scenario in our INE labs for our students to practice. The screenshots have been taken from our online lab environment.

Lab Link: Creating a Storage Bucket with Terraform

Objective

In this lab, you will use Terraform to create a storage bucket on GCP and upload an object to it.

Solution

Step 1: Choose the Start lab button and then choose Open lab. On the next page, agree to the terms and conditions and then select Continue.

You will be presented with access credentials, as shown in the following example.

The URL will take you to the Google Cloud Platform sign-in page. Sign in using the Username email you were provided with and choose Next.

Enter the password you were provided with and choose Sign in. If you're prompted to save the password, choose Not Now.You will be redirected to the Google Cloud Platform.

Install Terraform

Step 2: Download Terraform from the given link.

Link: https://www.terraform.io/downloads

Find and download the package appropriate for your operating system, and install it.

Find access token

Step 3: To find the access token. First, you need to login to Google Cloud Shell with the same credentials.

Link: https://shell.cloud.google.com/?pli=1&show=ide%2C

Now run the below-mentioned command to get the access token.

Command:

gcloud beta auth application-default print-access-token

Note: The access token may expire after some time. You need to generate a new access token each time you are running the terraform script. Otherwise, you may encounter the error.

Now copy and store the access token somewhere for future reference.

Create a new variables.tf file

Step 4: Create a file with the name "variables.tf" in your terraform folder and paste the below-mentioned code into it.

Code:

variable "region" {
    type = string
    default = "us-central1"
}
variable "bucket_name" {
    type = string



}
variable "project" {
    type = string
}
variable "access_token" {
    type = string
}

In the variables.tf file, we are not hard-coding the values of bucket_name, project, and access_token. You need to provide their value during the execution of the terraform script.

Create a main.tf file

Step 5: Your main.tf file will consist of the following components:

Initialization details

provider "google"{
  project = var.project
  region  = var.region
  access_token = var.access_token
}

Defining a storage bucket

resource "google_storage_bucket" "test" {
  name = var.bucket_name
  project = var.project
  location = var.region
  storage_class = "REGIONAL"
}

Pushing an object into bucket

resource "google_storage_bucket_object" "picture" {
  name   = "demo"
  source = "./images/pacademy.png"
  bucket = var.bucket_name
}

Now, you will combine all components into the main.tf file. In your main.tf file, copy and paste the following:

Code:

provider "google"{
  project = var.project
  region  = var.region
  access_token = var.access_token
}
resource "google_storage_bucket" "test" {
  name = var.bucket_name
  project = var.project
  location = var.region
  storage_class = "REGIONAL"
}
resource "google_storage_bucket_object" "picture" {
  name   = "demo"
  source = "./images/pacademy.png"
  bucket = var.bucket_name
}

Step 6: In your current directory, create a folder with the name "images" and store an image (png format) in it with the name "pacademy.png".

Run the terraform script

Step 7: To run the terraform script, copy the below-mentioned command and run it into your local command prompt or PowerShell.

Command:

terraform init

Step 8: Run terraform plan command

Command:

terraform plan

Note 1: In this step, you need to provide values for the project name, access token, and bucket name.

Note 2: The bucket name must be unique, otherwise, you will encounter the error.

Step 9: Run terraform apply command to create the resources on GCP.

Command:

terraform apply

After running terraform apply, you will encounter an error as shown in the below image.

To remove the error simply re-run the terraform apply command.

Command:

terraform apply

We can see the resources have been created.

Open Google cloud console and verify

Step 10: Open google cloud console and navigate to the cloud storage.

You can see, a bucket has been created.

Now, click on that bucket and verify whether the image is been pushed or not.

We can see that the image (demo object) is present in our bucket.

Conclusion

Congrats! We successfully created a storage bucket and pushed an object into it.

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