Credentials & Environment Variables

Terracotta AI supports managing cloud provider credentials and environment variables on a per-repository basis. These settings enable Terraform operations that require runtime access to cloud APIs or execution context.

📦 Credentials

Terracotta requires cloud provider credentials only for commands that interact with live infrastructure:

✅ Required By

• tc:plan: Runs terraform init and terraform plan using cloud credentials to resolve data sources, validate remote backends, and generate accurate plans.
• tc:drift: Compares Terraform code and state against live cloud infrastructure to detect drift caused by manual changes or out-of-band tools.

🚫 Not Required By

• tc:review, tc:guard, tc:conflict, tc:cost
  These commands rely solely on static analysis and do not require access to cloud provider APIs.

🔧 How to Add Credentials

1. Navigate to the Credentials & Environment tab for the repository.
2. Click + New Credential.
3. Select your cloud provider (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
4. Enter the required access credentials (e.g., access key & secret, or a service account JSON). To setup secure credentials for your AWS provider, see AWS Setup Guide
5. Save. Credentials are now available to tc:plan and tc:drift.

⚠️

Credentials are encrypted at rest and scoped to the specific repository.

🔌

Coming Soon: Support for dynamic credential injection from external sources such as IAM roles, HashiCorp Vault, or CI/CD secrets.

🌐 Environment Variables

Environment variables allow you to inject runtime context into Terraform executions—similar to a .env file or shell-based environment in CI/CD.

🧩 Common Use Cases

• TF_VAR_* variables for module inputs
• Cloud settings like AWS_REGION, GOOGLE_PROJECT, ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
• Auth tokens, backend configs, or runtime flags

🧪 When They’re Used

Environment variables are injected during:

• tc:plan: Terraform needs valid environment inputs to evaluate the plan
• tc:drift: Ensures correct runtime context when querying cloud resources

🚫

Environment variables are optional, but recommended if your Terraform relies on runtime configuration.

➕ Adding Environment Variables

To manage environment variables:

• Click + Add to define name-value pairs manually.
• Use Import from ENV to bulk import values from your local environment.

🔍 Summary