Terraform in CI/CD & GitOps

Automating Terraform

Running Terraform manually from your local machine is prone to errors, requires shared credentials, and lacks auditability. To scale infrastructure provisioning, you must run Terraform in a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline.

The CI/CD Workflow

1. Pull Request: A developer proposes changes to Terraform code.
2. CI Phase (terraform plan): The pipeline runs terraform init, terraform fmt -check, terraform validate, and terraform plan. The plan output is often posted back to the PR as a comment.
3. Approval: A reviewer inspects the plan and approves the PR.
4. Merge: The PR is merged into the main branch.
5. CD Phase (terraform apply): The pipeline runs terraform apply -auto-approve to provision the resources.

Security & Compliance Scanning

Before applying changes, it’s crucial to scan your IaC for security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance violations. Tools like Checkov, tfsec, and Terrascan can be integrated into the CI pipeline.

GitOps

GitOps is a set of practices where Git is the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. By combining Terraform with CI/CD and GitOps methodologies, all changes to infrastructure are driven by Git commits, ensuring full traceability and version control.