How to select workspaces in Terraform cloud?

Terraform Cloud offers a few options to select a workspace, ranging from prefix, tags to standard name. Workspace selection pattern plays a critical role in a good project configuration. As it enforces a standard across the wide projects.

In this blog post, I’ll be covering the three options to configure your workspace in Terraform with pros/cons of each.

1. Prefix

Workspace prefixes are great to use when you have multiple environments and the workspaces in the Terraform cloud follow a fixed pattern

In the example, we have the prefix “main-app-” which means

terraform {
  backend "remote" {
    hostname = "app.terraform.io"
    workspaces {
      prefix = "main-app-"
    }
  }
}

To select the correct workspace we can utilise the Terraform environment variable TF_WORKSPACE

export TF_WORKSPACE=dev

Using prefix is highly recommended compared to tags as it enforces a naming convention

2. Tags

The other approach is to utilise tags. This might sound great and easy to use, however I highly discourage it! Tags can become complicated and difficult to manage.

terraform {
  cloud {
    organization = "infinitypp"
    workspaces {
      tags = ["networking", "dev]
    }
  }
}

3. Workspace name

Workspace names are the default approach in selecting a workspace. This is a great approach and it’s great for small projects where multiple environments do not exist.

terraform {
  cloud {
    organization = "infinitypp"

    workspaces {
      name = "main-app-dev"
    }
  }
}

Pros and Cons of each method

Summary

In my past experience, using prefix is the way to go. It is easy on day to day operation as workspaces is a resource which you might create quiet often in the beginning of a project, and having a naming standard enforce across your projects is a great practice.

Keep in mind, to create your Terraform workspace via IaC. 

How to create Terraform Workspaces through code?

resource "tfe_organization" "organization" {
  name  = "my-org-name"
  email = "admin@company.com"
}

variable "environments" {
  type    = list(string)
  default = ["dev", "prod"]
}

resource "tfe_workspace" "main_app" {
  for_each     = toset(var.environments)
  name         = "main-app-${each.value}"
  organization = tfe_organization.organization.name
}

The above code enforces a naming standard and creates two workspaces:

1. main-app-dev
2. main-app-prod

We are using the for_each function to loop through the environment list. This makes it easier to add a new environment.