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Terraform Provider Restful

This is a general Terraform provider aims to work for any platform as long as it exposes a RESTful API.

The document of this provider is available on Terraform Provider Registry.

Features

  • Different authentication choices: HTTP auth (basic, token), API Key auth and OAuth2 (client credential, password credential, refresh token).
  • Customized CRUD methods and paths
  • Support precheck conditions
  • Support polling asynchronous operations
  • Partial body tracking: only the specified properties of the resource in the body attribute is tracked for diffs
  • restful_operation resource that supports arbitrary Restful API call (e.g. POST) on create/update

Why

Given there already exists platform oriented, first-class providers, why do I create this? The reason is that most providers today are manually maintained, which means some latest features are likely not available in these first-class providers. For this case, terraform-provider-restful can be used as your escape hatch.

Another common use case is that the platform you are currently working on do not have a Terraform provider yet. In this case, you can use terraform-provider-restful to manage the resources for that platform.

Requirement

terraform-provider-restful has following assumptions about the API:

  • The API is expected to support the following HTTP methods:
    • POST/PUT: create the resource
    • GET: read the resource
    • PUT/PATCH/POST: update the resource
    • DELETE: remove the resource
  • The API content type is application/json
  • The resource should have a unique identifier (e.g. /foos/foo1).

Regarding the users, as terraform-provider-restful is essentially just a terraform-wrapped API client, practitioners have to know the details of the API for the target platform quite well.