Organize Terragrunt configuration for production grade environment and deploy with Github Actions.

Photo by Raymond Rasmusson on Unsplash

Terraform has been around for so many years now and is definitely winning the IaaC race by some distance. Though the engineering folks at HashiCorp are building and releasing new features periodically but the Terraform user fraternity continues to face certain gaps.

Terragrunt enters the scene.

Terragrunt is a thin wrapper that provides extra tools for keeping your configurations DRY, working with multiple Terraform modules, and managing remote state.

Masses have struggled to understand the point and need of Terragrunt and when to use it. In simpler words, Terragrunt is an orchestrator to orchestrate Terraform code, execution and deployment.

This article is not about the benefits of Terragrunt or a tutorial to setup but a tried and tested way to organise folders, structure environments in Terragrunt.

Directory structure

.
└── terragrunt.hcl
    ├── prod
    │   ├── aks
    │   │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
    │   │   └── module.yaml
    │   ├── vnet
    │   │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
    │   │   └── module.yaml
    │   └── environment_common_vars.yaml    
    ├── staging
    │   ├── aks
    │   │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
    │   │   └── module.yaml
    │   ├── vnet
    │   │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
    │   │   └── module.yaml
    │   └── environment_common_vars.yaml 
    └── dev
        ├── aks
        │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
        │   └── module.yaml
        ├── vnet
        │   ├── terragrunt.hcl
        │   └── module.yaml
        └── environment_common_vars.yaml   

In the above structure, each environment like prod, staging, dev, etc. is represented as a folder, containing Terraform modules configuration which needs to be deployed.

Each environment has its own environment_common_vars.yaml which contains environment specific variables.

Each Terraform module has its own module.yaml and terragrunt.hcl which represents module specific variables and terragrunt configuration respectively.

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