coder/docs/admin/templates/managing-templates/change-management.md

Template Change Management

We recommend source-controlling your templates as you would other any code, and automating the creation of new versions in CI/CD pipelines.

These pipelines will require tokens for your deployment. To cap token lifetime on creation, configure Coder server to set a shorter max token lifetime.

coderd Terraform Provider

The coderd Terraform provider can be used to push new template versions, either manually, or in CI/CD pipelines. To run the provider in a CI/CD pipeline, and to prevent drift, you'll need to store the Terraform state remotely.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    coderd = {
      source = "coder/coderd"
    }
  }
  backend "gcs" {
    bucket = "example-bucket"
    prefix = "terraform/state"
  }
}

provider "coderd" {
  // Can be populated from environment variables
  url   = "https://coder.example.com"
  token = "****"
}

// Get the commit SHA of the configuration's git repository
variable "TFC_CONFIGURATION_VERSION_GIT_COMMIT_SHA" {
  type = string
}

resource "coderd_template" "kubernetes" {
  name = "kubernetes"
  description = "Develop in Kubernetes!"
  versions = [{
    directory = ".coder/templates/kubernetes"
    active    = true
    # Version name is optional
    name = var.TFC_CONFIGURATION_VERSION_GIT_COMMIT_SHA
    tf_vars = [{
      name  = "namespace"
      value = "default4"
    }]
  }]
  /* ... Additional template configuration */
}

For an example, see how we push our development image and template with GitHub actions.

Coder CLI

You can install Coder CLI to automate pushing new template versions in CI/CD pipelines. For GitHub Actions, see our setup-coder action.

# Install the Coder CLI
curl -L https://coder.com/install.sh | sh
# curl -L https://coder.com/install.sh | sh -s -- --version=0.x

# To create API tokens, use `coder tokens create`.
# If no `--lifetime` flag is passed during creation, the default token lifetime
# will be 30 days.
# These variables are consumed by Coder
export CODER_URL=https://coder.example.com
export CODER_SESSION_TOKEN=*****

# Template details
export CODER_TEMPLATE_NAME=kubernetes
export CODER_TEMPLATE_DIR=.coder/templates/kubernetes
export CODER_TEMPLATE_VERSION=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)

# Push the new template version to Coder
coder templates push --yes $CODER_TEMPLATE_NAME \
    --directory $CODER_TEMPLATE_DIR \
    --name=$CODER_TEMPLATE_VERSION # Version name is optional

Testing and Publishing Coder Templates in CI/CD

See our testing templates tutorial for an example of how to test and publish Coder templates in a CI/CD pipeline.

Next steps

• Coder CLI Reference
• Coderd Terraform Provider Reference
• Coderd API Reference