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Terraform Gitlab Provider Example

This is an extendable terraform module for User, Group, and Project Management. The input file is a yml file called secrets.yml, in general, it should be encrypted and the key should be secured in a Vault, just for testing purposes I have it in plain text as it doesn't contain any real information.

You can add new data to yml and the terraform module will create those resources dynamically.

Using this module you can:

  1. Create new users
  2. Create new projects
  3. Create new groups
  4. Specify projects for groups
  5. Specify users for groups
  6. Modify the resources
  7. Destroy Objects

For now it does not:

  1. Auto synchronize and fix the state drift, manual interaction is needed
  2. Auto import existing resources, manual interaction is needed

Connection setup:

  1. Create an access token for GitLab API with admin rights
  2. Add the GitLab api url and token to secrets.yml
  3. You can run terraform apply and it will create 10 users, 9 projects, 3 groups
  4. If you get API response error look at the issues section below
  5. Run terraform destroy to kill the resources

File description:

variables.tf contain the input data from secrets.yml and it is flattening some nested objects.
output.tf contains the output variables.
main.tf contains the resources for managing users, groups, projects.
provider.tf specifies the provider and version.
versions.tf specifies the terraform version.
secrets.yaml has the most important data like secrets and user/group/project information.

Import current gitlab state:

For adding the resource state of the existing users, projects, groups you will need it to do terraform import, and configure the yml file accordingly if you want to do changes on those resources. It can be automated using a script but it is not implemented here.
You can import a project state using terraform import gitlab_project.map <id>.
You can import a user to a terraform state using terraform import gitlab_user.map <id>.
You can import a group state using terraform import gitlab_group.map <id>.
You can import a membership state using terraform import gitlab_group_membership.map "group_id:user_id"

State drift:

If someone modifies the resources in GitLab that is tracked by terraform state, there will state drift, to fix this run terraform refresh, it will update the state file according to the physical infrastructure without changing the actual infrastructure.

Issues:

Gitlab provider is not used that much as Cloud Providers, it is expected to find some bugs. For example, sometimes the POST /api/v4/projects for creating projects it gets Internal Server Error 500, it is creating the project just the response is lost, so the terraform sends the request again to create the project and gets error Bad Request 400 already exists, I created an issue #470

Conclusion:

Gitlab provider can be used for GitLab management but the operator should be really careful, the operator might change some values and break the project as there not many constraints, also it requires time to create fully working modules, it will be more useful once the manual operations take a lot of time.

Next steps:

  1. Enrich the yml file for adding more arguments
  2. Automate the state synchronization while new resources are created manually using terraform import
  3. Save the changes to a file.
  4. (Complete) Generate the resources as a map and not list. With the current state if you delete one user from the beginning of the yml file terraform will see differences to all user resources because they are shifted so it affects all resources, it will work but it is confusing.