Terraform vSphere Provider

This is the repository for the Terraform vSphere Provider, which one can use with Terraform to work with VMware vSphere Products, notably vCenter Server and ESXi.

Coverage is currently only limited to a few resources namely surrounding virtual machines, but in the coming months we are planning release coverage for most essential vSphere workflows, including working with storage and networking components such as datastores, and standard and distributed vSwitches. Watch this space!

For general information about Terraform, visit the official website and the GitHub project page.

Using the Provider

The current version of this provider requires Terraform v0.10.2 or higher to run.

Note that you need to run terraform init to fetch the provider before deploying. Read about the provider split and other changes to TF v0.10.0 in the official release announcement found here.

Full Provider Documentation

The provider is documented in full on the Terraform website and can be found here. Check the provider documentation for details on entering your connection information and how to get started with writing configuration for vSphere resources.

Controlling the provider version

Note that you can also control the provider version. This requires the use of a provider block in your Terraform configuration if you have not added one already.

The syntax is as follows:

provider "vsphere" {
  version = "~> 0.3"
  ...
}

Version locking uses a pessimistic operator, so this version lock would mean anything within the 0.3.x namespace. Read more on provider version control.

Building The Provider

NOTE: Unless you are developing or require a pre-release bugfix or feature, you will want to use the officially released version of the provider (see the section above).

Cloning the Project

First, you will want to clone the repository to $GOPATH/src/github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-vsphere:

mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/terraform-providers
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/terraform-providers
git clone git@github.com:terraform-providers/terraform-provider-vsphere

Running the Build

After the clone has been completed, you can enter the provider directory and build the provider.

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-vsphere
make build

Installing the Local Plugin

After the build is complete, copy the terraform-provider-vsphere binary into the same path as your terraform binary, and re-run terraform init.

After this, your project-local .terraform/plugins/ARCH/lock.json (where ARCH matches the architecture of your machine) file should contain a SHA256 sum that matches the local plugin. Run shasum -a 256 on the binary to verify the values match.

Developing the Provider

If you wish to work on the provider, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (version 1.8+ is required). You'll also need to correctly setup a GOPATH, as well as adding $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH.

See Building the Provider for details on building the provider.

Testing the Provider

NOTE: Testing the vSphere provider is currently a complex operation as it requires having a vCenter endpoint to test against, which should be hosting a standard configuration for a vSphere cluster. Some of the tests will work against ESXi, but YMMV.

Configuring Environment Variables

Most of the tests in this provider require a comprehensive list of environment variables to run. See the individual *_test.go files in the vsphere/ directory for more details. The next section also describes how you can manage a configuration file of the test environment variables.

Using the .tf-vsphere-devrc.mk file

The tf-vsphere-devrc.mk.example file contains an up-to-date list of environment variables required to run the acceptance tests. Copy this to $HOME/.tf-vsphere-devrc.mk and change the permissions to something more secure (ie: chmod 600 $HOME/.tf-vsphere-devrc.mk), and configure the variables accordingly.

Running the Acceptance Tests

After this is done, you can run the acceptance tests by running:

$ make testacc

If you want to run against a specific set of tests, run make testacc with the TESTARGS parameter containing the run mask as per below:

make testacc TESTARGS="-run=TestAccVSphereVirtualMachine"

This following example would run all of the acceptance tests matching TestAccVSphereVirtualMachine. Change this for the specific tests you want to run.