Deploying a tunnel with terraform and connecting manually

[povilasb]

Existing documentation URL(s)

• https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/get-started/create-remote-tunnel/
• https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/deploy-tunnels/deployment-guides/terraform/

What changes are you suggesting?

There's the 2 above mentioned documents on how to create the Cloudflare tunnels in different ways:

1. manually via the dashboard,
2. with terraform.

I was dealing with a use case that is a combo of both:

1. created a tunnel with terraform,
2. and manually ran a Mac OS connector with cloudflared tunnel run

None of the docs cover this use case and quite some time was spent on how to make it work. Which roughly resulted in

1. describe the tunnel in Terraform based on: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/deploy-tunnels/deployment-guides/terraform/
2. but now I can't use something like

  // Configures the VM to run a startup script that takes in the Terraform variables.
  metadata_startup_script = templatefile("./install-tunnel.tpl",
    {
      tunnel_token = cloudflare_tunnel.auto_tunnel.tunnel_token
    })
    
  cloudflared:
    image: cloudflare/cloudflared:latest
    restart: always
    container_name: cloudflared
    command: tunnel run --token ${tunnel_token}

since my Mac OS machine is not managed by Terraform.

3. Then on Mac OS I had to do:

cloudflared login
cloudflared tunnel token --cred-file ~/.cloudflared/$TUNNEL_ID.json $TUNNEL_ID
cloudflared tunnel run

Quite simple but this command took me some time to find: cloudflared tunnel token --cred-file.

Do you think it would be worth expanding the docs?

Additional information

No response

[ranbel]

Hi @povilasb, thanks for raising this issue. Were you trying to create a remotely-managed tunnel or a locally-managed tunnel (see descriptions)? Are you able to manually get the token value and put it into cloudflared tunnel run --token ${tunnel_token}?

[povilasb]

Hi, I'm using a default value which I believe is cloudflare, i.e. "remotely managed".

So you know, I've got set this up successfully. And the only problem I'm raising is potentially documenting this case :)

[ranbel]

I don't think this is a new use case, but rather an issue with the Terraform page mixing up remotely-managed tunnels vs. locally-managed tunnels. From https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/operations/cloudflare-tunnel-create-a-cloudflare-tunnel, config_src defaults to creating a local tunnel. We're planning to rewrite the Terraform page to use remotely-managed tunnels instead (pending the 5.0.0 release), which should remove the need for --cred-file.

[povilasb]

ok, will stay in tune. Thank you.

[ranbel]

Hey @povilasb, Here are the updates to the Terraform guide: #21641 How to run a tunnel that was created using the API/Terraform: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/get-started/create-remote-tunnel-api/#4-install-and-run-the-tunnel