Automating Cloudflare DNS management with Terraform

This post is about managing Cloudflare zones and records in a declarative and version-controlled way, as a part of our journey to the infrastructure-as-code practices.

Terraform has published a verified Cloudflare provides in Terraform registry that’s used to interact with most of the resources supported by Cloudflare. I used this provider to automate the process of creating DNS zones and controlling DNS records (create, update and delete).

Requirements:

Terraform installed on your machine.

• Terraform module called: dns_management includes two Cloudflare resources (DNS zone and records).

resource "cloudflare_zone" "dns_zones" {
  for_each = var.dns_zones

  zone = each.key
  plan = each.value.plan
}


resource "cloudflare_record" "dns_records" {
  for_each = var.dns_records

  zone_id = each.value.zone_id
  name    = each.key
  value   = each.value.value
  type    = each.value.type
  ttl     = each.value.ttl
  proxied = each.value.proxied

}

Above module requires some variables to be defined in variables.tf file as below.

variable "dns_records" {
  type = map(object({
    zone_id = string
    value   = string
    type    = string
    ttl     = number
    proxied = string

  }))
  description = "map of DNS records information"
}

variable "dns_zones" {
  type = map(object({
    plan = string
  }))
  description = "DNS zone information"
}

Although it’s simple, the benefit of defining Cloudflare resources as a module is to make is reusable and make the main file where we will add dns records more readable and avoid repating ourselves :D.

example use of the above module.

module "dns_zones" {
  source = "./dns_management"

  dns_zones = {
    "example.sa" = {
      plan = "free"
    }
  }
  dns_records = {
    "terraform.example.sa" = {
      zone_id = local.zones_info.example_sa_id
      value   = "193.192.70.30"
      type    = "A"
      ttl     = 1
      proxied = false
    }

by running terraform plan in the above example, it will show that there are 2 resources that will be added to your Cloudflare account .. Changes can be applied by terraform apply .

Module repo on GitHub

For more details please refer to Cloudflare provider documentations in Terraform registry here.

Cheers,
Abeer Alotaibi