Terraform — Installing 3rd party Modules / Providers

Quick overview on how to install 3party modules & providers in terraform

Recently a project I’m working on called for adding computers in AD to existing OU groups. I couldn’t find an “official” provider for Terraform, but there was a community provider for this task found here :

• https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/type/community-index.html
• https://github.com/GSLabDev/terraform-provider-ad

I fumbled around for quite a bit trying to “install” this provider. Terraform states in its documentation to place all 3rd party plugins in the following (Non-Windows) directory:~/.terraform.d/plugins.

Installing

Prerequisites:

• Install GO. (I’m on a Mac and used homebrew to install)
  homebrew install go
• Add the following lines to your shell profile. I use z shell, and update the ~/.zshrc

# GOPATH
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export GOBIN=$HOME/go/bin
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:$GOPATH:$GOBIN:~/.local/bin:/usr/local/Cellar:~/Library/Python/3.7/bin/:$PATH

“Get” the Code

• With Go installed, now you can use the go get command on the repository. This will download and install the needed packages and create the executable needed for the terraform plugin directory.
• go get github.com/GSLabDev/terraform-provider-ad
• After running this, you now should have 3 directories in your [home] ~/go directory: [bin/pkg/src]
• In this example, my executable was in the “bin” directory and was named “terraform-provider-ad”.
• Now you can simply copy that file/executable to the .terraform.d/plugins directory
• cp ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-ad ~/.terraform.d/plugins
• You can now run your terraform init and be good to go!

“ad” provider shown after successful ‘terraform init’

Failures

For those interested, the things I initially tried before discovering the go get command include the following:

• Copying the repo of the provider to the plugin directory
• Copying to the darwin_amd64 dir as stated by the terraform init error output
• Cloning the repo and running a go build

It was the final step that finally clued me in that, what I needed to do, and the documentation stated (but I ignored since I’m stubborn) is to copy the “executable” to the plugins directory. This meant I needed an actual Provider executable. That’s when I realized I could use the go get command. I didn’t state the background at the beginning, because I wanted the instructions to be clear at that the top. But just know, I typically do a lot of silly things before settling on what works.