Terraform is a popular tool used for infrastructure automation. With Terraform, it becomes easy to manage complex infrastructure deployments across multiple cloud providers. However, managing the infrastructure as code with Terraform can become tedious and time-consuming when done manually. To solve this problem, many teams are using Git-based workflows and tools like GitHub Actions to automate the process. In this blog post, we will discuss how to automate Terraform pull requests using GitHub Actions.

What is a Pull Request?

A pull request (PR) is a feature of Git-based code repositories like GitHub. It allows contributors to propose changes to a codebase, and then submit those changes for review by other members of the team. Once the PR is approved, the changes can be merged into the main codebase.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD tool that allows users to automate workflows for their GitHub repositories. It integrates with GitHub repositories, and can be used to automate the building, testing, and deployment of code.

GitHub Actions also allows users to define custom workflows using YAML files. These workflows can be triggered by various events, including pull requests, pushes to a branch, or scheduled events.

Automating Terraform Pull Requests with GitHub Actions

To automate Terraform pull requests with GitHub Actions, we need to create a workflow that performs the following tasks:

1. Check out the pull request branch
2. Initialize Terraform
3. Plan the Terraform changes
4. Comment on the pull request with the Terraform plan
5. Validate the Terraform configuration syntax
6. Apply the Terraform changes

Let's take a look at how we can accomplish each of these tasks using GitHub Actions.

Step 1: Check out the Pull Request Branch

The first step is to check out the pull request branch. This can be accomplished using the actions/checkout action in the GitHub Actions workflow.

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name: Terraform Pull Request

on:
 pull_request:
   types: [opened, synchronize]

jobs:
 terraform:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
     - name: Checkout Pull Request
       uses: actions/checkout@v2
       with:
         ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

This workflow defines a job named "terraform" that runs on an Ubuntu virtual machine. The job has a single step that checks out the pull request branch using the actions/checkout action. The "ref" input is set to the pull request head reference, which ensures that the workflow checks out the correct branch.

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Step 2: Initialize Terraform

The next step is to initialize Terraform. This can be accomplished using the hashicorp/setup-terraform action.

- name: Setup Terraform
       uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v1
       with:
         terraform_version: 1.1.0

This step uses the hashicorp/setup-terraform action to install Terraform on the virtual machine. The "terraform_version" input is set to the version of Terraform that we want to use.

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Step 3: Plan the Terraform Changes

The next step is to plan the Terraform changes. This can be accomplished using the hashicorp/terraform-action action.

- name: Terraform Plan
       id: plan
       uses: hashicorp/terraform-action@v2
       with:
         terraform_version: 1.1.0
         args: plan -out

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