Hetzner Cloud Virtual Machine Provisioning with Terraform

A simple solution to provision servers in Hetzner Cloud with user-defined templates.

Prerequisites

• Terraform v. 0.3

Setup steps

• Create a project in Hetzner Cloud
• Add all necessary SSH public keys to Security > SSH Keys.
• Generate API token for read/write.
• Optionally create variables file from the template below and provide the values for the variables. You can skip this step. Terraform will then prompt for the values on terraform plan.

cp terraform.tfvars.template terraform.tfvars

• Run:

terraform init

Templates

The default template is docker, which can be found in templates/user_data_docker.yaml.tpl. It contains the installation of docker and docker-compose. It can be used for hosting applications in docker containers. By creating your own template, you can install and configure the VM optimized to your software requirements. The template file name needs to follow the pattern: user_data_<template_name>.yaml.tpl and has to be stored in templates folder.

Provision a VM

terraform plan
terraform apply