Terraform is one of the de-facto infrastructure-as-code tools out there. It keeps track of the described infrastructure state and tries to help you no

Understanding the terraform HTTP backend

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2024-10-26 13:00:05

Terraform is one of the de-facto infrastructure-as-code tools out there. It keeps track of the described infrastructure state and tries to help you not shoot yourself in the foot. It offers a wide variety of backends to store the state, the most popular ones being S3 and keeping state locally (as a beginner). Among the options provided is for example a Postgres backend. However lately my friend Evangelos Balaskas reminded me of the more generic HTTP backend, with an excellent blog post that combines GitLab and the HTTP backend.

I wanted to know more about the HTTP backend for some time now and I thought I should try to write a toy implementation to figure it out. I’ve never written any serious code with Golang and it seemed like a good oportunity to do something more than Go by example.

And ever if we modified the terraform_hello() function to return an empty JSON string we would still get an error about the version attribute. Note that we’d get the same errors with a simple nginx instead of our golang HTTP server too (and this is because we send back a 200 response which terraform cannot parse instead of a 404 or other that would make it think this is a new state). Changing however the function just a bit