Deploy a server on Digital Ocean via Terraform (HowTo)

Hello and welcome! Today we’ll walkthrough how to create a server (also know as a droplet) on Digital Ocean through Terraform. This is one of the simplest things that can be achieved with Terraform, but it illustrates understanding of basic concepts such as Infrastructure as code (IaC), Terraform itself, Terraform modules, cloud servers, basic networking and security practices.

Without futher ado, let’s jump right in

Acquire Digital Ocean Credentials

To be able to authenticate and authorize Terraform to create our sever on Digital Ocean we need appropriate credentials. Terraform requires different types of credentials depending on the Terraform provider in use. To authenticate and authorize the provider responsible for applying our configurations we will need a Digital Ocean API Token, obtained from the screen below.

Setup the Digital Ocean Terraform provider

Now that we’ve got our API Token for authenticating and authorizing Terraform, we can start creating our Terraform configuration. We’ll start out by creating a providers.tf file. Inside this file we’re going to provide the neccesary configuration to setup the Digital Ocean (digitalocean) provider.

We’ll start our file with the following content:

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terraform {
  required_providers {
    digitalocean = {
      source  = "digitalocean/digitalocean"
      version = "~> 2.0"
    }
  }
}

This set’s up the terraform block. Within this block we configure the digitalocean provider as a required provider.

Next we’ll configure the provider itself by appending the following code to our providers.tf file:

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# Configure the DigitalOcean Provider
provider "digitalocean" {
  token = var.do_token
}

This code configures the digitalocean provider with the access token token. This is the same token we acquired from step 1.

There’re several ways to provide the real value of our API key to Terraform.

• We could create a terraform.tfvars file and fill out the value of our variable as so:

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do_token=real_key_value

• We could create an environment variable on our host machine with the name TF_VAR_do_token and set it’s value to that of our key’s, as so:

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export TF_VAR_do_token=real_key_value

Replacing real_key_value with the approriate value for our API key in each case.

With both of these methods Terraform will be able to find the value to our variable when it executes our configuration.

Initialize Terraform

With configuring our provider out of the way, it’s time to Initialize our Terraform configuration.

We do this simply by running the following command on the command line:

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terraform init

During initialization Terraform downloads the required provider files to our configuration and initializes our backend.

Setup the server deploy configuration

With Terraform initialized, it’s time to actually create the configuration that deploys our server (also called a droplet in Digital Ocean lingo).

We’ll start by creating a new file, server.tf. Our configuration goes as so:

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resource "digitalocean_vpc" "server_vpc" {
  name     = "server-vpc"
  region   = var.do_region
  ip_range = "10.10.10.0/24"
}

resource "digitalocean_droplet" "server" {
  name     = "server"
  size     = "s-1vcpu-1gb"
  image    = "ubuntu-22-04-x64"
  region   = var.do_region
  vpc_uuid = digitalocean_vpc.server_vpc.id
}

Our code creates two Terraform resource blocks. The first one, a digitalocean_vpc resource, creates the Virtual Private Network within which our server will live on Digital Ocean.

• the name attribute configures the name of our vpc network
• the region attribute through the var.do_region variable, configures in what part of the world we want our vpc deployed
• the ip_range attribute configures the preferred IPAddress range for our network
• the vpc_uuid attribute directs our server to be placed within the server-vpc network we created as the first step

The second block creates a Terrafom digitalocean_droplet resource, and configures it with name, size, image and region attributes. These attributes are compulsory to have our server created on Digital Ocean.

As their names indicate;

• the name attribute configures the name of our server on Digital Ocean
• the size attribute configures the Processor (cpu) and Memory (RAM) combination of our server
• the image attribute configures the particular Operating System image we’d like our server to come with
• the region attribute configures the location in the world where we’d like our server deployed.

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do_region=fra1

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export TF_VAR_do_region=fra1

Apply the Terraform configuration

It’s time to apply our terraform configuration and create our resources on Digital Ocean. To confirm that we will be doing exactly what we intend we’re going to first run the terraform plan command. The output of this command should be similar to the following;

A look below the output will show the output 2 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy. This means that we’re all in order as we’ll be adding two resources, changing none, and destroying none.

If our output matches the one pictured above then we can go ahead and run terraform apply to apply our configuration.

A confirmation screen should be presented similar to the one below, to which we should answer yes.

On succes we should get an output similar to below from Terraform;

HURRAYY!! 🎉 🎉 You’ve successfully deployed a server to Digital Ocean via Terraform.

Hope you found this post helpful! Peace out!!