Manage Applications with Terraform

Terraform is a popular and powerful tool that enables you to version your infrastructure as code. In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Terraform to manage your resources locally within Basis Theory. By the end of this guide, you will have created an Application under your tenant using Terraform, and you will have an Application key available for you to use.

Table of contents

1. Install Terraform
2. Set up Terraform configuration
   1. Set up the basistheory provider
   2. Set up the basistheory_application resource
   3. Set up the output for your Application key
3. Executing Terraform
4. Using Terraform to manage other Basis Theory resources

To start, you’ll need a new Management Application with application:create, application:read, application:update, and application:delete permissions. Click here to create one.

Install Terraform

To achieve the following steps, you must have the Terraform CLI installed locally or wherever you’re planning on running your configuration. The best guide for installing Terraform can be found on their own website here.

Set up Terraform configuration

Let’s set up the Terraform configuration you’ll need for creating an Application and exporting the Application key you’ll need to interact with other Basis Theory resources.

Set up the basistheory provider

Firstly, you’ll need to configure the terraform configuration block in a main.tf file. Let’s add a source for where to pull down our Terraform provider, and pin the version as well. View the latest version available here.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    basistheory = {
      source  = "basis-theory/basistheory"
      version = ">= 0.1.3"
    }
  }
}

Now you’ll need to define some details for the provider. To start with you can define the API URL, API key, and client timeout within the basistheory provider.

provider "basistheory" {
  api_url        = "https://api.basistheory.com"
  api_key        = "<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>"
  client_timeout = 5
}

Another configuration option is to just set the API key through setting a BASISTHEORY_API_KEY environment variable. This leaves you with optionally setting the API URL and client timeout through BASISTHEORY_API_URL and BASISTHEORY_CLIENT_TIMEOUT environment variables, respectively. These don’t need to be explicitly set since the API URL defaults to https://api.basistheory.com and the client timeout defaults to 15 seconds. So the most minimal main.tf file can look like this:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    basistheory = {
      source  = "basis-theory/basistheory"
      version = ">= 0.1.3"
    }
  }
}

provider "basistheory" {
}

Set up the basistheory_application resource

Typically, resources are set up in a different file from the provider and terraform block. So let’s create an application.tf file with the configuration for our Application. Feel free to modify the following configuration for your use case:

resource "basistheory_application" "my_application" {
  name = "My Application"
  type = "server_to_server"
  permissions = [
    "token:general:create",
    "token:general:read:low",
    "token:pci:create",
    "token:pci:read:low",
  ]
}

Set up the output for your Application key

To make use of the Application you create, you’ll need to extract the key. Defining output blocks make data about your resources available for use within the command line. Define the ouput block in a new output.tf file with the contents below:

output "my_application_key" {
  value       = basistheory_application.my_application.key
  description = "My Application key"
  sensitive   = true
}

Executing Terraform

Now that our configuration is set up, it’s time to execute Terraform commands to get these resources created.

The first step in managing any resources via Terraform, is to initialize your directory with your configuration. There are many things that occur when initializing Terraform, one of which is downloading the basistheory provider from the public Terraform registry. Let’s run the following terraform commands within the same directory containing your configuration.

terraform init

A prudent step to ensure you have a valid configuration is to run basistheory’s provider validations against your current configuration. This command uses local resources to validate against the downloaded provider and does not talk to any remote resources. If your configuration is valid the command prints out Success! The configuration is valid..

terraform validate

Finally, you can apply the configuration using the apply command. apply will output a plan Terraform intends to execute and waits for your confirmation. This plan contains differences between your current configuration and your current Terraform state. After reviewing the plan, type yes to create your Application within Basis Theory.

terraform apply

If all was successful, Terraform should output that 1 resource was successfully added. If you made it this far, pat yourself on the back! 🎉 You’ve successfully created an Application via Terraform! You can view your new Application within the Portal.

Now in order to use the Application API Key for curl commands, for example, you’ll need to export the key that was just created. You can do this by executing the output command below:

The following command will print the sensitive Application key to the terminal.

terraform output -raw my_application_key

You can follow our quickstart with curl guide and skip to step 3 to create tokens with your Application API key output.

Using Terraform to manage other Basis Theory resources

If you’d like to manage other Basis Theory resources via Terraform, take a look at the other docs we’ve made available in the Terraform provider docs.