How to manage DNS records with dynamic updates on PowerDNS and terraform

This post details how to manage DNS records with dynamic updates and terraform with your authoritative server.

Requirements

Enable DNS update to your pdns.conf

dnsupdate=yes

Create a Tsig key and set metadata to your zone to authorize DNSUPDATE and AXFR with TSIG authentication.

TSIG-ALLOW-DNSUPDATE
TSIG-ALLOW-AXFR

Provider configuration

1. Create a main.tf file

2. Install the provider “dns” then, run terraform init.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    dns = {
      source = "hashicorp/dns"
      version = "3.1.0"
    }
  }
}

3. Configure your provider with address of the DNS server to send updates to and TSIG authentication parameters

provider "dns" {
  update {
    server        = "192.168.0.1"
    key_name      = "example.com."
    key_algorithm = "hmac-md5"
    key_secret    = "3VwZXJzZWNyZXQ="
  }
}

Create DNS record

The following records can be managed from the provider terraform:

• A
• AAAA
• CNAME
• TXT
• PTR
• SRV
• NS
• MX

Example for A record:

resource "dns_a_record_set" "www" {
  zone = "example.com."
  name = "www"
  addresses = [
    "192.168.0.1",
    "192.168.0.2",
    "192.168.0.3",
  ]
  ttl = 300
}

Run terraform destroy to delete it.