Terraform: Google cloud provider environment variables not read as file as expected

[pvanderlinden]

If you set any of the environment variables as specified in the Google cloud provider documentation, the file is not actually read, but tries to parse the filename as JSON. (GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS, GOOGLE_CLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON, GCLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON, see https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/google/index.html#credentials)

Example:

$ terraform plan
There are warnings and/or errors related to your configuration. Please
fix these before continuing.

Errors:

  * provider.google: credentials are not valid JSON '/home/me/.gcloud/credentials.json': invalid character '/' looking for beginning of value

Terraform version: 0.7.2

[cblecker]

Hi @pvanderlinden,
The documentation says "Contents of the JSON file used to describe your account credentials". If you were specifying this in a Terraform config, you'd use credentials = "${file("credentials.json")}". However, if you want to use the environment variables, you actually have to read the JSON containing the service account credentials into the environment variable itself.

Example:

export GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS=`cat credentials.json`

That being said, in my experience, the easiest way to handle these credentials if you already have the gcloud SDK installed is to login with gcloud auth login, and then have credentials = "" in your google provider. Terraform will use the gcloud SDK credentials to make calls against Google's API.

Hopefully this answers your question!

[mitchellh]

Thanks @cblecker

[pvanderlinden]

Thanks, I have to say the variable names are confusing though.

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