Manage multiple workspaces from a single configuration file in terraform

Question

I want to create two different workspaces on Terraform Cloud: One for DEV environment, the other for PROD environment.

I am trying to create them hust using a single configuration file. The infrastructure will be the same just in two different Azure subscriptions with different credentials.

Here the code I am trying:

terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.1.0"
  
  required_providers {
    #https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs
    azurerm = {
      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"
      version = "~> 3.40.0"
    }
  }
  
  cloud {
    organization = "mycompany"
    
    workspaces {
      tags = ["dev", "prod"]
    }
  }
}

I am watching the documentantion. It seems like inside the cloud -> workspace command I just can use either name or tags attributes. It is required I have at least one of them in my configuration.

Now in my Terraform Cloud account, I have two workspaces: 1 with the tag prod and one with the tag dev.

I set the envinroment variable:

$Env:TF_WORKSPACE="mycompany-infrastructure-dev"

And I try to initialize Terraform Cloud:

terraform init

But I get this error:

Error: Invalid workspace selection Terraform failed to find workspace "mycompany-infrastructure-dev" with the tags specified in your configuration: │ [dev, prod]

How can I create one configuration that I can use with different environment/workspaces?

Thank you

Answer 1

First, I ran the similar code as yours in my environment and received an error shown below: It prompted me to use terraform login to generate a token for accessing the organization on Terraform Cloud.

The login was successful, and the browser generated an API token.

Token received and entered.

Logged into Terraform cloud as shown:

In Terraform Cloud -> Organizations, I created a new organization:

Script for creating different workspaces from a single configuration file:

cloud {
    organization = "mycompanyone"
    
    workspaces {
      tags = ["dev", "prod"]
      }
      }

Taken your script and made a few changes as seen below:

Terraform will prompt for basic concerns while initializing, as shown here.

Now run terraform init or terraform init -upgrade.

terraform initialized successfully:

Answer 2

The reason you have this issue is that to match a workspace that workspace must have ALL the tags you specify.

So instead of having dev and prod tags have tags that uniquely describe the workspace. E.g. my-company, infrastructure. Then make sure that you create two workspaces with different names that both have those tags. Then you can target that workspace with the TF_WORKSPACE environment variable.