Provider customization

Terraform communicates with cloud and global network provider APIs such as Cloudflare through modules known as providers. These providers are installed automatically when you run terraform init in a directory that has a .tf file containing a provider.

Typically, the only required parameters to the provider are those required to authenticate. However, you may want to customize the provider to your needs. The following section covers some optional settings ↗ that you can pass to the Cloudflare Terraform provider.

Adjust the default Cloudflare provider settings

Note

The examples below build on the Cloudflare Terraform tutorial.

You can customize the Cloudflare Terraform provider using configuration parameters, specified either in your .tf configuration files or via environment variables, such as $CLOUDFLARE_RPS. Using environment variables may make sense when running Terraform from a CI/CD system or when the change is temporary and does not need to be persisted in your configuration history.

Increase the frequency of API requests

The api.cloudflare.com endpoint has a default rate limit of 1,200 calls per five minute period, or four requests per second (refer to API Rate Limits). Terraform will need to stay below the defined threshold or the Cloudflare API will respond with HTTP 429 - Too Many Requests responses. When this happens, the Cloudflare Terraform provider will back off before retrying.

Enterprise customers may request a limit increase by contacting their account team. You can then configure the Cloudflare Terraform provider to make API calls at a faster rate. For example, you can increase the API request frequency by setting environment variables:

# Remove requests-per-second (RPS) limit for API calls performed by Terraform (default: 4).
export CLOUDFLARE_RPS=
# Print logs from the API client using the default log library logger (default: false).
export CLOUDFLARE_API_CLIENT_LOGGING=true
# Maximum backoff period in seconds after failed API calls (default: 30).
export CLOUDFLARE_MAX_BACKOFF=20