Author Archives: lawrencegripper

Coding, How to

Easily Debugging Terraform Provider for Azure in VSCode

So you’re making a change to the provider to add a feature, it’s going great and your ready to test it out…. but then you realize things get a bit ropey… ideally you want a visual debugger to step through the code.

Well here is how to set that up in VSCode.

First make sure you have VSCode setup for golang debugging (delve configured etc). Then it’s easy, say you want to debug a new provider you’ve written and it has a test called TestAccDataSourceAzureRMFunction_basic in the file data_source_function_test.go then you can setup your launch.json file in VSCode to look like:

(Makes sure you replace the details in the private.env with your service principal and subscription details)

 

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How to

Writing Bash doesn’t have to be as painful as you think! Shellcheck to the rescue.

So I’ve found myself writing lots of bash scripts recently and because they tend to do real things to the file system or cloud services they’re hard to test… it’s painful.

neverfear

So it turns out there is an awesome linter/checker for bash called shellcheck which you can use to catch a lot of those gotchas before they become a problem.

There is a great plugin for vscode so you get instant feedback when you do something you shouldn’t.

Better still it’s easy to get running in your build pipeline to keep everyone honest. Here is an example task for Azure Devops to run it on all scripts in the ./scripts folder.

Next on my list is to play with the xunit inspired testing framework for bash called shunit2 but kinda feel if you have enough stuff to need tests you should probably be using python.

 

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Azure, Coding, Uncategorized

Friends don’t let friends commit Terraform without fmt, linting and validation

So it starts out easy, you write a bit of terraform and all is going well then as more and more people start committing and the code is churning things start to get messy. Breaking commits block release, formatting isn’t consistent and and errors get repeated.

Seems a bit odd right, in the middle of your devops pipe which dutifully checks code passes tests and validation you just give terraform a free pass.

Captain Picard Quotes. QuotesGram

The good new is terraform has tools to help you out here and make life better!

Here is my rough script for running during build to detect and fail early on a host of terraform errors. It’s also pinning terraform to a set release (hopefully the same one you use when releasing to prod) and doing a terraform init each time to make sure you have providers pinned (if not the script fail when a provider ships breaking changes and give you an early heads up).

It’s rough and ready so make sure your happy with what it does before you give it a run. For an added bonus the docker command below the script runs it inside a Azure Devops container to emulate locally what should happen when you push.

Optionally you can add args like -var java_functions_zip_file=something  to the terraform validate call.

Hope this helps as a quick rough guide!

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