Move your Terraform Backend to any Custom S3

We recently had to swtich from an Terraform-Artifactory Backend to an S3 one.

Since we do not work with AWS mostly, we have to use a “custom S3 provider”.

by visualweb.com

This is what the result looks like:

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    key      = "<path to state on S3>/terraform.tfstate"
    endpoint = "https://obs.<region>.<Domain>"
    skip_region_validation = true
    skip_credentials_validation = true
  }
}

I’m aware the those two skip flags are obsolet, but they just work fine in our case…

We use skip_region_validation because we had to set eu-de as our region and terraform wount get tired to tell us that we dont use an valid AWS-S3 region like us-west-1 or so.

[...]
region
  The region of the S3 bucket.
Enter a value: eu-de
Error initializing new backend: 
Error configuring the backend "s3": Invalid AWS Region: eu-de
Please update the configuration in your Terraform files to fix this error
then run this command again.

We had to use skip_credentials_validation because it seams that terraform tries to connect to AWS where our providede credentials didn’t work.

Error initializing new backend: 
Error configuring the backend "s3": error validating provider credentials: error calling sts:GetCallerIdentity: InvalidClientTokenId: The security token included in the request is invalid.
 status code: 403, request id: b362379c-xyz-11e9-xyz-a7268117c56f
Please update the configuration in your Terraform files to fix this error
then run this command again.

Then we where able to run our Terraform init command:

terraform init -backend-config "bucket=<S3 Bucket name>" -backend-config "access_key=$TF_VAR_access_key" -backend-config "secret_key=$TF_VAR_secret_key"

Which then finished successfull:

- module.some-module-name
Initializing the backend...
Initializing provider plugins...
Terraform has been successfully initialized!
You may now begin working with Terraform. Try running "terraform plan" to see
any changes that are required for your infrastructure. All Terraform commands
should now work.
If you ever set or change modules or backend configuration for Terraform,
rerun this command to reinitialize your working directory. If you forget, other
commands will detect it and remind you to do so if necessary.

Cheers!