Terraform is a well-known solution for defining, provisioning, and managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Most of the content out there focuses on major clouds as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
I'd like to focus on Proxmox, an open source hypervisor used in a lot of home labs and also in production for companies that follow the baremetal approach, like Woovi.
Proxmox Infrastructure
Proxmox is a virtualization platform. You can create VMs and LXC (Linux Containers) using the UI, but when your team grows, and you want to be able to reproduce the same staging environment at production, you need to use IaC.
IaC is also great to make sure something is reproducible.
VMs vs LXC
You can think of LXC as simpler and lighter VMs.
LXC provides less isolation, and some software can't run on top of it easily, like microk8s nodes.
We are going to focus on LXC to make this article simpler.
Provisioning using Terraform
You can have the whole definition in the same file or split it into many files in the same folder.
First, define the provider Proxmox from Telmate.
Also, define the Proxmox provider variable like api_url, token ID, and token secret.
You can follow this documentation terraform for proxmox to generate the token ID and token secret.
terraform {
required_providers {
proxmox = {
source = "telmate/proxmox"
version = "3.0.2-rc04"
}
}
}
provider "proxmox" {
pm_api_url = "https://myproxmoxnode:8006/api2/json"
pm_tls_insecure = true
pm_log_enable = true
pm_debug = true
pm_api_token_id = var.PM_API_TOKEN_ID
pm_api_token_secret = var.PM_API_TOKEN_SECRET
pm_log_levels = {
_default = "debug"
_capturelog = ""
}
}
variable "PM_API_TOKEN_ID" {}
variable "PM_API_TOKEN_SECRET" {}
define the LXC resource
resource "proxmox_lxc" "mongo-1" {
target_node = "dev1"
hostname = "mongo1"
ostemplate = "local:vztmpl/ubuntu-24.04-standard_24.04-2_amd64.tar.zst"
password = var.LXC_PASSWORD
unprivileged = true
cores = 1
memory = 512
swap = 512
rootfs {
storage = "local-lvm"
size = "50G"
}
network {
name = "eth0"
bridge = "vmbr0"
ip = "10.99.90.2/16"
gw = "10.99.0.3"
}
ssh_public_keys = file("~/.ssh/id_ansible.pub")
start = true
}
Run ini to initialize Terraform
terraform init
Run apply to provision the lxc resource
terraform apply
Run destroy to destroy everything
terraform destroy
In this setup, you need to save the local Terraform files to avoid recreating the resources. For production, the best approach is to keep Terraform state in an S3 bucket
In Conclusion
You don't need to start your MVP Startup using Terraform to provision everything in your Proxmox.
My recommendation is to keep improving automation as you and your team grow.
After you get the first Terraform working, the rest gets easier.
How are you using Terraform in your company?
Woovi
Woovi is a fintech platform revolutionizing how businesses and developers handle payments in Brazil. Built with a developer-first mindset, Woovi simplifies integration with instant payment methods like Pix, enabling companies to receive payments seamlessly and automate financial workflows.
If you want to work with us, we are hiring!
Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash