Deploying your infrastructure with Scalr and GitHub Actions

8. For this Service Account to work correctly for us we are going to need to provide it with access to three different areas within Scalr. Firstly under Roles we need to give access to account-min-access which provides the service account the ability to perform minimal operation on the account, ensure the Grant on is set to Account. Then click Assign.

Next we need to provide access to the environment; select environment-min-access from the the Roles dropdown, Environment from Grant on and finally select your environment name from the Environment dropdown. In our example that is Non-production. Finally click on Assign.

9. Now that the access is all setup for the Service Account we need to generate a token for use. Click the Generate token button.

10. Give the Token a Description that is meaningful should you require and click Copy and Save.

1. From your repository root click on Settings.

2. Click the disclosure on the Secrets and variables menu item.

3. Click Actions.

4. Click on New repository secret.

For the Name field we need to set that as SCALR_TOKEN, the Secret should be set to whatever Token value you copied from Scalr, finally click Add secret.

Firstly we need to ensure that our version of Terraform is set to less than v1.6, in this instance we will use v1.5.6.

terraform {
  required_version = "1.5.6"

  # ...
}

Next we need to instruct Terraform to use Scalr as our backend, this has three properties that are required to be set:

• hostname: the Scalr URL to your Organization.
• organization: the Environment ID from your Scalr Organisation.
• name: the name of the Workspace that the code is going to be deployed into.

terraform {
  # ...

  backend "remote" {
    hostname = "ministry-of-magic.scalr.io"
    organization = "env-tqaqjimtnmmgiv0"

    workspaces {
      name = "github-actions"
    }
  }

  # ...
}

The final element required within our terraform block is the required_providers, this instructs Terraform where to download the provider from and what version constraints to be applied if defined.

terraform {
  # ...

  required_providers {
    scratch = {
      source = "BrendanThompson/scratch"
    }
  }
}

resource "scratch_string" "this" {
  in = "Hello, GitHub Actions"
}

output "github_actions_string" {
  value = scratch_string.this.in
}

As I said, a very simple Terraform root module definition, we are merely going to be printing a message to the output. Next we will step into the GitHub Actions (GHA) workflow file, this file MUST exist within the .github/workflows directory in your repository.

name: Scalr
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - uses: Scalr/scalr-action@v1
      with:
        scalr_hostname: 'ministry-of-magic.scalr.io'
        scalr_token: ${{ secrets.SCALR_TOKEN }}
        terraform_output: true
        terraform_version: '1.5.6'

    - run: terraform init

    - id: plan
      run: terraform plan

    - run: echo "${{ steps.plan.outputs.stdout }}"
    - run: echo "${{ steps.plan.outputs.stderr }}"
    - run: echo "${{ steps.plan.outputs.exitcode }}"

    - id: apply
      run: terraform apply -auto-approve

    - run: echo ${{ steps.apply.outputs.server_ip }}

This defines us a very basic GHA workflow wherein any push to the main branch triggers an execution of the workflow. Firstly we checkout the Terraform code from the repository using actions/checkout@v2 then we setup the Scalr environment on the runner with the Scalr/scalr-action@v1 action, this is where we provide the Scalr Organisation and Token as well as optionally a Terraform version. If the Terraform version is not provided then Scalr will attempt to work it out for itself.

The next steps should look fairly familiar:

• terraform init: initialises our code, pulls providers and modules as well as setting up connectivity to the backend.
• terraform plan: plan our version of the code against what exists in production.
• terraform apply: applies any changes to the environment.