Working with a Filesystem in Terraform

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Working with a Filesystem in Terraform

You are a DevOps engineer at an organization that is migrating all their configuration management to Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The organization is preparing for an upcoming audit, and the security team has created lists of permissions the auditors should have. Since these permission sets do not map to any existing roles, you will need to create custom roles. You will need to create these roles using Terraform and leverage as much automation as possible to prevent potential copy and paste errors. Using Terraform's filesystem functions, you will create Terraform code to convert the text files from the security team into custom GCP roles.

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Lab Info

Level

Advanced

Last updated

Sep 15, 2025

Duration

1h 0m

Challenge

Create a Custom GCP Role with the Permissions Listed in the 'compute_audit.txt' File
- Create a terraform directory to work in for this lab.
- Run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linuxacademy/content-advanced-terraform-with-gcp/main/filesystem_lab/compute_audit.txt to copy the compute permissions file into your directory and review the permissions.
- Create a main.tf file.
- Define a provider and a google_project_iam_custom_role.
- Use the split and file() functions to set the permissions argument to the contents of the text file.
- Run terraform init.
- Run terraform apply.
Challenge

Update the Terraform Code to Create a Custom Role for All '.txt' Files in the Directory
- Run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linuxacademy/content-advanced-terraform-with-gcp/main/filesystem_lab/storage_audit.txt to copy the storage permissions file into your directory and review the permissions.
- Update the role using the for_each meta-argument and fileset() function to create a role for each text file.
- Run terraform init.
- Run terraform apply.

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