Terraform Atmosphere 🌍

Atmos is a thin wrapper for managing Terraform Workspaces easily. Using the workspace name it will select the correct .tfvar file, defaulting to a qa var file for any other workspace. This is primarily for pipelines but works just as well from the command line. It can process all terraform commands and parameters passing them on directly. Atmos will automatically switch workspaces per git branches if it discovers its in a git repository

Quick Start

Local Use

Atmos requires terraform to be installed on your system.

• Clone this atmos project
• Symlink atmos.py to your /usr/bin/ $ ln -s $(pwd)/atmos.py /usr/bin/atmos
• Set up your ~/.aws/credentials to include a [default] stanza which is where your S3 backend storage is.
• Setup other stanzas in your credentials file for each environment you want. For example [dev] with your dev account IAM credentials
• You can also setup environment variables and use the -e flag. See below for more.
• Use $ atmos apply/plan/destroy to run terraform apply whilst maintaining environment context

CI/CD

• Build the atmos image
• Use atmos as the build image in your CI/CD
• Include switching/creating terraform workspaces
• Use $ atmos apply/plan/destroy to run terraform apply whilst maintaining environment context

Directory structure

Atmos requires the following file structure

├── main.tf
├── variables.tf
└── vars
    ├── dev.tfvars
    ├── preprod.tfvars
    ├── prod.tfvars
    └── qa.tfvars

The vars directory is scanned by atmos and matches the current workspace to the vars file. If the workspace is not found it defaults to the qa environment. This is to ensure qa branches are deployed similarily without having to create a var file for each new branch.

AWS Credentials

To get the most out of Terraform workspaces it is recommended that the AWS provider uses the profile attribute.

# main.tf
provider "aws" {
    region = "${var.region}"
    profile = "${var.workspace}"
}

# variables.tf
variable "workspace" {
    type = "string"
    default = "default"
}

This will make Terraform lookup AWS credentials from the ~/.aws/credentials file using the workspace name as the stanza name.

atmos -e

Adding the -e flag to atmos will make it generate a new ~/.aws/credentials file from environment variables. You must first include the default access key ID & secret access key like this:

DEFAULT_ACCESS_KEY_ID=id
DEFAULT_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=key

All additional workspaces need to be prefixed in the same way:

DEV_ACCESS_KEY_ID=id
DEV_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=key

QA_ACCESS_KEY_ID=id
QA_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=key

atmos -m

Adding -m flag will set to manual mode. It will not try to automatically switch workspace per branch. It will adhere to whatever you last set the workspace to.

atmos -p

Adding -p flag will set the project prefix when looking for credentials.

Example: $ atmos -e -p PROJ plan

Will make atmos look for environment vars with the prefix 'VER' selecting the following env vars.

PROJ_DEV_ACCESS_KEY_ID
PROJ_DEV_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Note this also works on the .aws/credentials file

atmos -v

Verbose output mode, will show the vars atmos has selected and some environment context