Configuring the Terraform provider

Once the Azure SP has been created, we will configure our Terraform code to connect to Azure with this SP. For this, follow these steps:

1. In a directory of your choice, create a new filename, provider.tf (extension.tf corresponds to Terraform files), which contains the following code:

provider "azurerm" {
      subscription_id = "<subscription ID>"
      client_id = "<Client ID>"
      client_secret = "<Client Secret>"
      tenant_id = "<Tenant Id>"
}

In this code, we indicate that the provider we are using is azurerm and that the authentication information to Azure is the service principal created. However, for security reasons, it is not advisable to put identification information in code, knowing that this code may be accessible by other people.

1. We will, therefore, improve the previous code by replacing it with this one:

provider "azurerm" {}

1. So, we delete the credentials in the Terraform code and we will pass the identification values to specific Terraform environment variables:
   • ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
   • ARM_CLIENT_ID
   • ARM_CLIENT_SECRET
   • ARM_TENANT_ID

As a result, the Terraform code no longer contains any identification information.

We have just seen how to configure Terraform for Azure authentication. We will now explain how to quickly configure Terraform to perform local development and testing.