Terraform and WSL2 issue

February 21, 2022 Danny McDermott

Here’s a quick note on an issue that I encountered today (plus it seems, many other people).

I went to run a Terraform workflow on my system via WSL2, but I cam across a number of problems.

First, was that I couldn’t obtain the State that was stored in an Azure Storage account container. Previously, I used the following config:

backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = ""
    storage_account_name = ""
    container_name       = "terraform-backend"
    key                  = ""
 }

At runtime, I would specify the values like the example below.

export TF_CLI_ARGS_init="-backend-config=\"storage_account_name=${TERRAFORM_STATE_CONTAINER_NAME}\" -backend-config=\"resource_group_name=${RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME}\" -backend-config=\"access_key=${STG_KEY}\""

However, today, that didn’t work as it just stalled trying to connect to the storage container.

I thought it was something wrong with my credentials, so for troubleshooting purposes, I added the storage account key to see if that made a difference

backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = ""
    storage_account_name = ""
    container_name       = "terraform-backend"
    key                  = ""
    access_key           = ""
}

I added the primary storage key and lo and behold, this time, it worked.

Strange, as I hadn’t updated the terraform cli or providers.

The next problem I saw was that when I tried to run

terraform plan

it would not complete, seemingly freezing. To troubleshoot this, I ran

export TF_LOG="TRACE"

before running the plan to tell me what was happening in the background.

This in turn produces a verbose output, but something that did catch my was this:

Strange. I know I have internet connectivity and I could certainly connect to Azure using az cli, so I did some Goole-fu and found the following: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8022

It was exactly the same problem I had encountered.

Applying the fix https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5420#issuecomment-646479747 worked for me and persisted beyond a reboot.

(run the code below in your WSL2 instance)

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
sudo bash -c 'echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf'
sudo bash -c 'echo "[network]" > /etc/wsl.conf'
sudo bash -c 'echo "generateResolvConf = false" >> /etc/wsl.conf'
sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

It appears to have occurred in the latest Windows update and affects WSL2. It only appears to affect Go / Terraform as far as I can tell.

Hopefully this will help anyone having a similar issue until the Go provider is fixed.