Using environment variables with workspaces

Terraform uses environment variables to customize aspects of its behavior. Environment variables are used to increase the output verbosity for debugging or to set rarely used runtime parameters.

For example, parallelism is one of the environment variable with a number flag range between 1 and 256, the default value is 10. Parallelism is used to configure infrastructure providers that error on concurrent operations or use during non-standard rate limiting, when you execute terraform plan and terraform apply at runtime.

Environment variables can only be set using the workspace update API and the CLI passing a JSON file. See the Workspace update CLI command for more details.

Usage

Passing TF_CLI_ARGS as env-vars

You can pass Terraform command-line arguments TF_CLI_ARGS as environment variables, like TF_CLI_ARGS_plan, and TF_CLI_ARGS_apply in the Schematics workspace to customize operations.

Terraform reads these environment variables and applies them runtime. For more information about Terraform command-line arguments, see TF_CLI_ARGS and TF_CLI_ARGS_name.

Example setting parallelism or TF_LOGS

The examples shown here can be used to set any environment variable to be passed to Terraform.

Setting parallelism at create time

The code block is the sample payload for creating workspace with the Schematics Create API with parallelism passed as an environment variable.

{
    "name": "bb",
    "type": [
        "terraform_v1.4"
    ],
    "template_repo": {
        "url": "url"
    },
    "template_data": [
        {
        "folder": ".",
        "type": "terraform_v1.4",
        "variablestore": [
        {
          "value": "<val>",
          "name": "ibmcloud_api_key",
          "type": "string",
          "secure": true
        }
        ],
        "env_values": [
        {
          "TF_LOG": "debug"
        },
        {
          "TF_CLI_ARGS_apply": "-parallelism=20"
        },
        {
          "TF_CLI_ARGS_plan": "-parallelism=20"
        }
        ]
    }
    ]
}

Setting parallelism after create

A sample env_values block in the payload to update environment variables using the Schematics Workspace Update API. For a more detailed example, see Update workspace input variables API.

"env_values": [
    {
        "TF_CLI_ARGS_plan": "-parallelism=20"
    },
    {
        "TF_LOG": "debug"
    }
    ]

Setting parallelism for Catalog deployments

Environment variables can only be set at content onboarding time. Refer to the Catalog documentation to set the TF_CLI_ARGS environment variables.

List of Terraform environment variables

IBM Cloud Schematics supports following environment variables for debugging purpose. For more information about special environment variables, see Environment variables.

Supported environment variables
Variable	Description	Usage
`TF_LOG`	The detailed logs that appear on standard error. Support values are TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, or ERROR	`"TF_LOG": "TRACE"`
`TF_LOG_PROVIDER`	For debugging Terraform provider issues, see Managing Log Output.	`"TF_LOG_PROVIDER": "TRACE"`
`TF_INPUT`	Command to disable prompts for entering the input value. The default value is false or 0.	`"TF_INPUT": "0"`
`TF_CLI_ARGS` and `TF_CLI_ARGS_name`	The `TF_CLI_ARGS` specify additional arguments to the command-line. This allows easier automation in cloud infrastructure environments. Also to modify the default behavior of the Terraform on your own system. `TF_CLI_ARGS` and `TF_CLI_ARGS_name` is only for non content catalog.	`"TF_CLI_ARGS_apply": "-parallelism=20"`
`TF_REGISTRY_DISCOVERY_RETRY`	Set the maximum number of request retries the remote registry client can attempt for client connection errors.	`"TF_REGISTRY_DISCOVERY_RETRY": "10"`
`TF_REGISTRY_CLIENT_TIMEOUT`	Set to increase the extraneous circumstances. The default value for the remote registry is `10 seconds`.	`"TF_REGISTRY_CLIENT_TIMEOUT": "15"`
`TF_IGNORE`	Output the debug messages to display ignored files and folders. This is useful when you debug the repositories with `.terraformignore` files. The default value is trace.	`"TF_IGNORE": "trace"`
`TF_PARALLELISM`	Read parallelism environment variable in runtime action and reset the parallelism value on all the Schematics actions only for content catalog. `TF_PARALLELISM` is only for content catalog.	`"TF_PARALLELISM": "20"`

Additional environment variables are supported for debugging Terraform provider issues, see Managing Log Output.