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[TUTORIAL]

Using Hetzner Object Storage as Terraform S3 backend

• 1min read • engineering devops automation

Hetzner’s Object Storage is an S3-compatible service, meaning it can be used for configuring Terraform backends with.

Here’s how you do that, assuming you’ve gone through the process of creating a bucket as well as generating S3 keys for it

backend "s3" {
  bucket = "your-bucket"
  endpoints = {
    s3 = "https://hel1.your-objectstorage.com" # Hetzner's endpoint
  }
  key = "your-project.tfstate" # Name of the tfstate file

  region                      = "main" # this is required, but will be skipped!
  skip_credentials_validation = true   # this will skip AWS related validation
  skip_metadata_api_check     = true
  skip_region_validation      = true
  skip_requesting_account_id  = true   # skips checking STS 
  use_path_style              = true   # Ceph-S3 compatibility
  skip_s3_checksum            = true   # Ceph-S3 compatibility
}

Notes:

  • you want to skip the mechanisms for fetching account ID from STS, as well as other S3 validation steps
  • use the correct endpoint corresponding to your Hetzner Bucket’s region, here hel1.your-objectstorage.com
  • it is recommended you use AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY in your environment instead of baking these keys into your Terraform files
  • skips checksums, currently needed for Ceph-S3 type services (https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/34086#issuecomment-1814188931)
≫ terraform init

Initializing the backend...

Successfully configured the backend "s3"! Terraform will automatically
use this backend unless the backend configuration changes.