Struggling with S3 Backend credentials in Terraform initialization

Backend
1

Hey everyone, I’m hitting a roadblock with Terraform and could use some help!

I’m trying to set up a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub and Terraform for an AWS EC2 instance. I’m pretty new to this, so I followed a tutorial I found online. But when I run terraform init, I’m getting an error about S3 Backend credentials.

Here’s what my setup looks like:

# main.tf
terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket = "my-terraform-state-bucket"
    key    = "global/s3/terraform.tfstate"
    region = "us-west-2"
  }
}

# Other resource definitions...

I’ve double-checked my S3 bucket settings, and encryption is enabled. I’ve also made sure my AWS CLI is configured with the right credentials.

Has anyone run into this before? What am I missing? Any tips would be super helpful!

2

I encountered a similar issue when setting up my Terraform backend. One often overlooked factor is the IAM role permissions. Ensure your IAM role has sufficient permissions to access the S3 bucket and perform the necessary operations. Additionally, verify that your AWS credentials are correctly set in your environment variables or AWS configuration file. If you’re using a CI/CD pipeline, make sure the credentials are properly configured there as well. Lastly, double-check the S3 bucket’s versioning status - it should be enabled for Terraform state management. These steps resolved my initialization problems.

3

hey there! i’ve had similar issues before. have you tried using environment variables for your aws creds? like AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY? sometimes that works better than relying on the aws cli config. also, are you sure your IAM user has the right permissions for s3? what exact error message are you getting? it might give us more clues!

4

yo BoldPainter37, sounds like a pain! have u checked if ur using the correct profile? sometimes terraform defaults to a diff one. try adding profile = “your_profile_name” to ur backend config. also, make sure ur not using any special chars in ur bucket name. thats tripped me up b4!