And let’s move on to the second post in the series!

If you want to see what we discussed in the first post of the series where I talk about the objective and how to configure the local environment, I recommend starting here:

Terraform: Taking the Next Step – Building Infrastructure from Scratch on GCP

What we’re going to do today:

  • Create a project on GCP
I'm not going to create a whole organization here, I'm going to create simple projects in a personal account, but let's not consider this as best practices in a corporate environment, ok?
  • Create a Service Account with specific permissions
  • Generate the authentication key (JSON)
  • Configure the environment variable for Terraform to access GCP

1. Creating the project on GCP

  • Access the [GCP Console](https://console.cloud.google.com/)
  • Click on the project selector (top left corner) > **New Project**

  • Give it a name (e.g. terraform-lab) and click "Create"
  • Save the project ID — we'll use it later

Remember to select the newly created project in the project selector!

2. Creating a Service Account

  • In the GCP menu, go to **IAM & Admin > Service Accounts**

  • Click on "Create service account"

  • Name: terraform-sa

  • Permissions:
    • **Editor** (or, for something more secure: Compute Admin, Storage Admin, etc.)

  • Finish and click "Create key" > **JSON**

  • Save the terraform-sa-key.json file in a secure location

3. Exporting the key for Terraform

In the terminal, set the environment variable:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/path/to/terraform-sa-key.json"

Or if you’re using PowerShell:

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS", "/path/to/terraform-sa-key.json", [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

In the next post we’ll create our first Terraform project, defining the file structure and creating a real resource (like a VPC and/or GCS bucket).