Creating a GHES server in Azure using TerraForm

This procedure will create a virtual machine in Azure with GitHub Enterprise Server installed automatically using TerraForm. All the needed resources will be created without interaction.

Instructions

NOTE: This procedure assumes you have already azure cli and terraform installed and configured with GitHub Azure account. Also it expects there is a RSA public key. If you dont have one create one quickly with the following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"

Create Virtual Machine:

Edit variables.tf and replace voxsteel with your GitHub @handle. Or any other prefix, it has to be unique.

Edit main.tf and update the path with the location of your RSA key key_data = file("~/.ssh/unused/id_rsa.pub")

All image versions of GitHub Enterprise available in Azure can be found using this command:

az vm image list --all -f GitHub-Enterprise | grep '"urn":' | sort -V

Run commands:

1. terraform init - The terraform init command initializes a working directory containing Terraform configuration files. This is the first command that should be run after writing a new Terraform configuration or cloning an existing one from version control. It is safe to run this command multiple times.
2. terraform plan - The terraform plan command creates an execution plan, which lets you preview the changes that Terraform plans to make to your infrastructure
3. terraform apply - The terraform apply command executes the actions proposed in a Terraform plan.

After the terraform apply it will finish with the outputs (as example):

Outputs:

VM-PUBLIC-IP = "20.120.24.233"
VM-admin = "voxsteel"

Destroy Virtual Machine:

To destroy resources (when you finish troubleshooting): terraform destroy and confirm with yes when ask Enter a value:

Other resources

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/resources/virtual_machine