Terraform Connect to Vault and Use Approle Auth Method to Set a KV Secret

Introduction

This article assumes you have set up an on prem Vault Server and are logged in with a root token (for configuring Vault).

Set Up Vault with Approle

First, we need to configure Vault for Approle, and create a user, user-id, and secret-id.

NOTE: For simplicity sake, we'll create a highly privileged admin user.

Create Admin Policy

Save the following in a file called admin.hcl:

path "*" {
    capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list", "sudo"]
}

Notify Vault of Our Policy

vault policy write admin-policy admin.hcl

Turn on Approle

vault auth enable approle

Create Admin User

When we create the admin user, we set the admin user with the admin-policy.

vault write auth/approle/role/admin policies=admin-policy

Note that while the rest of the path is important, there's nothing specifically magical about the "admin" user.

We could replace admin everywhere with "poppinsm".

vault write auth/approle/role/poppinsm policies=admin-policy

This will create a poppinsm user who is also super powerful like the real world Marry Poppins.

Create Authentication Credentials

Take a note of the output for the following commands:

vault read auth/approle/role/admin/role-id
vault write -f auth/approle/role/admin/secret-id

Now we have role_id and secret_id.

Turn on KV Secrets Engine

vault secrets enable -path=kv-v1 kv

Create Terraform File

mkdir vault
cd vault
touch main.tf

Paste the following into main.tf.

Note: We replace ROLE_ID and SECRET_ID with the strings of the same name that we created above when we created the user credentials.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    vault = {
      source = "hashicorp/vault"
      version = "3.5.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "vault" {
  auth_login {
    path = "auth/approle/login"

    parameters = {
      role_id   = "ROLE_ID"
      secret_id = "SECRET_ID"
    }
  }
}

resource "vault_generic_secret" "example" {
  path = "kv-v1/secret/foo"

  data_json = <<EOT
{
  "foo":   "bar",
  "pizza": "cheese"
}
EOT
}