👋 Introduction

In my role as a DevOps Engineer, I tackled the challenge of importing our existing Cloudflare configurations into Terraform. Manual migration would have been time-consuming and error-prone. cf-terraforming—a powerful tool that automates this process by generating Terraform resource code and fetching resource IDs directly from Cloudflare.

⚙️ Installation

On macOS, installation is straightforward using Homebrew:

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brew tap cloudflare/cloudflare
brew install cloudflare/cloudflare/cf-terraforming

✅ Prerequisites

Before getting started, ensure you have:

• A Cloudflare account with defined resources
• Cloudflare API key
• An initialized Terraform directory

🔑 Setting Up Credentials

Best practice is to store Cloudflare credentials as environment variables:

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# When using API Key
export CLOUDFLARE_EMAIL='user@example.com'
export CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY='my_cloudflare_api_key'

💻 Key Commands

🛠️ Generating Resources

To generate Terraform code for your Cloudflare resources:

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cf-terraforming generate \
    --resource-type "cloudflare_record" \
    --zone "my_zone_id" >> generated_resources.tf

⬇️ Importing Resources

To get import commands and resource IDs:

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cf-terraforming import \
    --resource-type "cloudflare_record" \
    --zone "my_zone_id"

🤔 Difficulties That I Faced

While using cf-terraforming, I encountered several challenges:

• Resource Naming: The tool assigned resource IDs as names, leading to less readable Terraform code.
• Import Limitations: Some resources were not supported by cf-terraforming, requiring manual handling.

To overcome these issues, I:

• Renamed Resources: Updated the resource names in the Terraform files for clarity.
• Custom Script for Resource IDs: Created a script to retrieve resource IDs and integrate them into the Terraform import commands.

💡 Pro Tips

• Resource Naming: cf-terraforming names resources based on IDs. Consider renaming them for better readability.
• Version Control: Always commit your generated Terraform code to version control.
• Validation: After importing, use terraform plan to verify the imported state matches the actual configuration.

🛠️ Available Commands

The tool offers several useful commands:

• generate: Create Terraform resource definitions
• import: Generate import commands
• version: Check tool version
• help: Access detailed help

🎉 Conclusion

cf-terraforming significantly streamlines the process of managing Cloudflare resources with Terraform. While it may require some post-processing for resource naming, it’s an invaluable tool for DevOps automation.