Terraform templates with Maps

For a project I’m working on, I needed to define a list of ports, and set some properties on some of them. In the Ansible world, you’d use statements like:

{% if data.somekey is defined %}something {{ data.somekey }}{% endif %}

or

{{ data.somekey | default('') }}

In a pinch, you can also do this:

{{ (data | default({}) ).somekey | default('') }}

With Terraform, I was finding it much harder to work out how to find whether a value as part of a map (the Terraform term for a Dictionary in Ansible terms, or an Associative Array in PHP terms), until I stumbled over the Lookup function. Here’s how that looks for just a simple Terraform file:

output "test" {
    value = templatefile(
        "template.tmpl",
        {
            ports = {
                "eth0": {"ip": "192.168.1.1/24", "name": "public"}, 
                "eth1": {"ip": "172.16.1.1/24", "name": "protected"}, 
                "eth2": {"ip": "10.1.1.1/24", "name": "management", "management": true}, 
                "eth3": {}
            },
            management = "1"
        }
    )
}

And the template that goes with that?

%{ for port, data in ports ~}
Interface: ${port}%{ if lookup(data, "name", "") != ""}
Alias: ${ lookup(data, "name", "") }%{ endif }
Services: ping%{ if lookup(data, "management", false) == true } ssh https%{ endif }
IP: ${ lookup(data, "ip", "Not Defined") }

%{ endfor }

This results in the following output:

C:\tf>terraform.exe apply -auto-approve

Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

test = Interface: eth0
Alias: public
Services: ping
IP: 192.168.1.1/24

Interface: eth1
Alias: protected
Services: ping
IP: 172.16.1.1/24

Interface: eth2
Alias: management
Services: ping ssh https
IP: 10.1.1.1/24

Interface: eth3
Services: ping
IP: Not Defined

Naturally, using this in your own user-data or Custom Data field will probably make more sense than just writing it to “output” 😁

Featured image is “Stockholms Stadsbibliotek” by “dilettantiquity” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.