Templates

Templates define the infrastructure underlying workspaces. Each Coder deployment can have multiple templates for different workloads, such as ones for front-end development, Windows development, and so on.

Coder manages templates, including sharing them and rolling out updates to everybody. Users can also manually update their workspaces.

Manage templates

Coder provides production-ready sample templates, but you can modify the templates with Terraform.

# start from an example
coder templates init

# optional: modify the template
vim <template-name>/main.tf

# add the template to Coder deployment
coder templates <create/update> <template-name>

Persistent and ephemeral resources

Coder supports both ephemeral and persistent resources in workspaces. Ephemeral resources are destroyed when a workspace is not in use (e.g., when it is stopped). Persistent resources remain. See how this works for a sample front-end template:

Resource	Type
google_compute_disk.home_dir	persistent
kubernetes_pod.dev	ephemeral
└─ nodejs (linux, amd64)
api_token.backend	ephemeral

When a workspace is deleted, all resources are destroyed.

Parameters

Templates often contain parameters. In Coder, there are two types of parameters:

Admin parameters are set when a template is created/updated. These values are often cloud secrets, such as a ServiceAccount token, and are annotated with sensitive = true in the template code.
User parameters are set when a user creates a workspace. They are unique to each workspace, often personalization settings such as "preferred region" or "workspace image".

Best Practices

Template Changes

We recommend source controlling your templates.

Authenticating with Cloud Providers

Coder's provisioner process needs to authenticate with cloud provider APIs to provision workspaces. We strongly advise against including credentials directly in your templates. You can either pass credentials to the provisioner as parameters, or execute Coder in an environment that is authenticated with the cloud provider.

We encourage the latter where supported. This approach simplifies the template, keeps cloud provider credentials out of Coder's database (making it a less valuable target for attackers), and is compatible with agent-based authentication schemes (that handle credential rotation and/or ensure the credentials are not written to disk).

Cloud providers for which the Terraform provider supports authenticated environments include

Google Cloud
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Kubernetes

Additional providers may be supported; check the documentation of the Terraform provider for details.

The way these generally work is via the credentials being available to Coder either in some well-known location on disk (e.g. ~/.aws/credentials for AWS on posix systems), or via environment variables. It is usually sufficient to authenticate using the CLI or SDK for the cloud provider before running Coder for this to work, but check the Terraform provider documentation for details.

Next: Workspaces

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