OCI Code Editor

 

We discussed about OCI Resource manager in the previous post. Resource manager is a managed service to execute terraform code. In this article, let’s look at another powerful tool - OCI Code Editor, a serverless development environment that allows us to write, store, and run Terraform code directly from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console.

OCI Code editor is part of OCI Developer services which comes with inbuilt developer tools like python, oci command line, terraform, ansible, docker, yum, shell, etc. We can create executables and can be executed through the appropriate tools. The interface is similar to Microsoft visual studio, expect the plugins are already installed. In this article we will discuss how to use OCI editor and how to execute terraform code.

Code editor can be invoked from dashboard in oci console. It will take few minutes to open the code editor. Like OCI Resource manager the oci authentication happens internally, code editor runs OCI Shell inside with direct access to OCI resources. It doesn’t need explicit terraform provider or authentication protocol.

Code editor has 4 components, Explorer, Search, Source control repository and Plugins.

Explorer – File browser for Cloud shell.

Search – To search files having specific keyword.

Source control repository –    Option to integrate with OCI DevOps repository. We can store our code in OCI Devops repository and clone it. Using Git operations we can pull, push, commit, branch. Its similar to visual studio code.

Plugins – By default it comes with Core, Data-flow, Functions, Data Science and Resource manager. We can consider the resources that needs code support are available in plugin section.

Core – It will list our all the resources configured in each compartment.

Data-flow- Dataflow application and projects can be configured in code editor.

Functions – Applications can be created and configured.

Resource Manager – OCI Resource manager stacks can be created and accessed from here.

Data Science – Data science Projects can be accessed and configured.

Terraform with Code editor

Code editor uses Cloud Shell internally and Terraform comes installed in code editor by default.

We will use Explorer option in code editor, In the explorer we can create folders and Terraform files can be kept inside that.

As the Code editor uses OCI Cloud Shell internally, we don’t need to include terraform provider file and authentication variables (tenancy, user OCID).

Since the Code Editor runs on OCI Cloud Shell, Terraform is already installed and ready to use. We can create a new folder and place our .tf files inside it. Consider the example – InstanceS folder in the above picture. This folder has terraform files to create compute instance with shielding. It has created in module approach and the module file is in “modules” folder. It has main.tf and variables.tf. The main terraform code is available at main.tf and the required variables are declared in variables.tf and its values are defined in terraform.tfvars file. The terraform code is available at https://github.com/kmkittu/OCIRepo

The terraform files can be created/edited here, or it can be uploaded from local storage.

Terraform code execution

The terraform code can be executed via Integrated terminal.

 

Right click on Instance folder and click “Open in Integrated Terminal”

We can execute all terraform commands (init, plan, apply, etc) here. 

Terraform execution is seamless and fully supports integration with version control (Git) operations for managing our infrastructure as code.