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Team & Governance

Upload Your Sentinel Policy Set to Terraform Cloud

  • 5 min
  • Products Usedterraform

After you have successfully tested your policy with the Sentinel CLI, you are ready to apply it to a real infrastructure setting by uploading it to Terraform Cloud.

»Prerequisites

For this tutorial you will need:

»Write a Policy Set

Create a new file called sentinel.hcl in your learn-sentinel-policies directory which is the configuration file Terraform uses to apply your policies and how strictly to enforce them. If you have multiple policies in your policy repo, they must be listed here. Terraform Cloud applies them in the order they appear in this file.

policy "restrict-s3-buckets" {
    enforcement_level = "hard-mandatory"
}

Add this new file to your GitHub repository.

$ git add sentinel.hcl

Commit and push the new file to your remote policy repository

$ git commit -m "Adding sentinel config file" && git push

Notice the configured enforcement_level for the policy you created. There are three levels of enforcement associated with policies in Terraform Cloud: advisory, soft mandatory, and hard mandatory. From most permissive to least permissive:

AdvisorySoft MandatoryHard Mandatory
Logged but allowed to passTeams based permissions for overridesDefault enforcement level
Overrides logged for audit if the policy failsThis policy must pass
Only way to override is to explicitly remove the policy

»Connect the policy set

In the Terraform Cloud UI, navigate to Settings > Policy Sets > Connect a new policy set.

Policy Sets

Select the policy set repository you just created as the source. For more information or for other VCS connection settings, visit our documentation on VCS Integrations.

Policy Sets Continued

Terraform Cloud applies policy sets either across your organization, or to specific workspaces. Choose the workspace with your example Terraform configuration sentinel-example. Add and save to create the policy set.

Your policy sets appear in the Policy Sets Settings and you can edit the policy set permissions and scope:

Success

»Trigger a Sentinel Check

Change into your Terraform configuration directory.

$ cd ~/learn-sentinel-tfc

Edit your main.tf file with a failing ACL.

## ...
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "bucket" {
  bucket = "${var.refix}-${random_pet.petname.id}"
-  acl    = "public-read"
+  acl    = "public-read-write"
## ...

Run the Terraform apply command in your terminal.

$ terraform apply

Your organization policy check returns false in your terminal and you cannot apply this configuration.

Running apply in the remote backend. Output will stream here. Pressing Ctrl-C
will cancel the remote apply if it's still pending. If the apply started it
will stop streaming the logs, but will not stop the apply running remotely.

Preparing the remote apply...

To view this run in a browser, visit:
https://app.terraform.io/app/hashicorp-rachel/sentinel-example/runs/run-QuSj5offbgipboDv

Waiting for the plan to start...

Terraform v0.12.24
Configuring remote state backend...
Initializing Terraform configuration...

## ...
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organization policy check:

========================= Results for policy set: learn-sentinel-policies ========================

Sentinel Result: false

Sentinel evaluated to false because one or more Sentinel policies evaluated
to false. This false was not due to an undefined value or runtime error.

1 policies evaluated.

## Policy 1: learn-sentinel-policies/restrict-s3-buckets (hard-mandatory)

Result: false

FALSE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:34:1 - Rule "main"
  FALSE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:35:6 - acl_allowed
    FALSE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:28:5 - all s3_buckets as _, buckets {
    buckets.change.after.acl in allowed_acls
}

FALSE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:27:1 - Rule "acl_allowed"



Error: Organization policy check hard failed.

Revert your changes in your main.tf file to the original parameters.

## ...
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "bucket" {
  bucket = "${var.refix}-${random_pet.petname.id}"
-  acl    = "public-read-write"
+  acl    = "public-read"
## ...

Run terraform apply again to observe a successful policy check.

$ terraform apply

Your successful policy check returns true and gives you a prompt to approve the changes. Type yes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organization policy check:

========================= Results for policy set: learn-sentinel-policies ========================

Sentinel Result: true

This result means that Sentinel policies returned true and the protected
behavior is allowed by Sentinel policies.

1 policies evaluated.

## Policy 1: learn-sentinel-policies/restrict-s3-buckets (hard-mandatory)

Result: true

TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:34:1 - Rule "main"
  TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:35:6 - acl_allowed
    TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:28:5 - all s3_buckets as _, buckets {
    buckets.change.after.acl in allowed_acls
}
  TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:35:22 - bucket_tags
    TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:15:5 - all s3_buckets as _, buckets {
    all required_tags as rt {
        buckets.change.after.tags contains rt
    }
}

TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:27:1 - Rule "acl_allowed"

TRUE - ./restrict-s3-buckets.sentinel:14:1 - Rule "bucket_tags"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you want to perform these actions in workspace "sentinel-example"?
  Terraform will perform the actions described above.
  Only 'yes' will be accepted to approve.

  Enter a value:

»Destroy your infrastructure

Your apply operation creates real resources. Run the terraform destroy command to avoid unnecessary charges to your AWS account.

$ terraform destroy

»Further reading

HashiCorp
stdin: is not a tty