The k8s Terraform provider enables Terraform to deploy Kubernetes resources. Unlike the official Kubernetes provider it handles raw manifests, leveraging kubectl directly to allow developers to work with any Kubernetes resource natively.

This project is a maintained fork of ericchiang/terraform-provider-k8s.

Use go get to install the provider:

go get -u github.com/banzaicloud/terraform-provider-k8s

Register the plugin in ~/.terraformrc (see Documentation for Windows users):

providers {
  k8s = "/$GOPATH/bin/terraform-provider-k8s"
}

Download a release from the Release page and make sure the name matches the following convention:

Install the plugin using Terraform Third-party Plugin Documentation:

The provider takes the following optional configuration parameters:

• If you have a kubeconfig available on the file system you can configure the provider as:

provider "k8s" {
  kubeconfig = "/path/to/kubeconfig"
}

• If you content of the kubeconfig is available in a variable, you can configure the provider as:

provider "k8s" {
  kubeconfig_content = "${var.kubeconfig}"
}

WARNING: Configuration from the variable will be recorded into a temporary file and the file will be removed as soon as call is completed. This may impact performance if the code runs on a shared system because and the global tempdir is used.

The k8s Terraform provider introduces a single Terraform resource, a k8s_manifest. The resource contains a content field, which contains a raw manifest.

variable "replicas" {
  type    = "string"
  default = 3
}

data "template_file" "nginx-deployment" {
  template = "${file("manifests/nginx-deployment.yaml")}"

  vars {
    replicas = "${var.replicas}"
  }
}

resource "k8s_manifest" "nginx-deployment" {
  content = "${data.template_file.nginx-deployment.rendered}"
}

# creating a second resource in the nginx namespace
resource "k8s_manifest" "nginx-deployment" {
  content   = "${data.template_file.nginx-deployment.rendered}"
  namespace = "nginx"
}

In this case manifests/nginx-deployment.yaml is a templated deployment manifest.

apiVersion: apps/v1beta2
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: ${replicas}
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.7.9
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

The Kubernetes resources can then be managed through Terraform.

$ terraform apply
# ...
Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 1 changed, 0 destroyed.
$ kubectl get deployments
NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   3         3         3            3           1m
$ terraform apply -var 'replicas=5'
# ...
Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 1 changed, 0 destroyed.
$ kubectl get deployments
NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   5         5         5            3           3m
$ terraform destroy -force
# ...
Destroy complete! Resources: 2 destroyed.
$ kubectl get deployments
No resources found.

• Helm 2 or Helm 3

Get a versioned chart into your source code and render it

helm fetch stable/nginx-ingress --version 1.24.4 --untardir charts --untar
helm template --namespace nginx-ingress .\charts\nginx-ingress --output-dir manifests/

helm pull stable/nginx-ingress --version 1.24.4 --untardir charts --untar
helm template --namespace nginx-ingress nginx-ingress .\charts\nginx-ingress --output-dir manifests/

Apply the main.tf with the k8s provider

# terraform 0.12.x
locals {
  nginx-ingress_files   = fileset(path.module, "manifests/nginx-ingress/templates/*.yaml")
}

data "local_file" "nginx-ingress_files_content" {
  for_each = local.nginx-ingress_files
  filename = each.value
}

resource "k8s_manifest" "nginx-ingress" {
  for_each = data.local_file.nginx-ingress_files_content
  content  = each.value.content
  namespace = "nginx"
}