Veilid Terraform GCP

Because GCP has a free tier, we can run a super tiny VM for free. And Veilid-Server is a super low resource consumer, so we can easily run a node to sustain and grow the network.

This terraform configuration will help you do that!

Cost

Because GCP doesn't (currently) charge for ephemeral ipv4 addresses, we can run a dual stack network (with both ipv4 and ipv6 configuration) for free. So this veilid node will have both enabled by default.

Setting up access

1. Sign up for a GCP account if you don't already have one and create a project. Just call it whatever you want, but use that value in the provider block in main.tf.

2. Install the gcloud cli. The docs here are very good and easy to follow.

3. Set up authentication locally. Just run gcloud auth application-default login and you'll have the credentials stored for when you want to run commands via terraform.

Running the terraform commands

1. Add your public SSH key to the metadata in main.tf in the format of "USER:PUBLIC_SSH_KEY_CONTENTS". I've left the veilid user in there by default, but you can specify whichever username you want.

If you want to use a separate SSH key, then generate one in this folder like ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -o -a 100 -f veilid-key.

2. Decide which region(s) you want to run a veilid node in, and uncomment the relevant line(s) in the locals.free_regions block in regions.tf. NOTE: only the regions in free_regions qualify for the free tier, so use one of those unless you want to spin up a bunch of nodes and pay more.

3. Run the terraform command and get a/some shiny new node(s)!

terraform init && terraform apply

Outputs:

public_ip_ipv4 = [
  "35.212.176.254",
]
public_ip_ipv6 = [
  "2600:1900:4040:6a7:0:0:0:0",
]

and you can connect via ssh like so:

ssh -i ROUTE_TO_PRIVATE_KEY veilid@IP_ADDRESS_FROM_OUTPUT

NOTE: since the cloud init script takes a bit of time to run, if you SSH in immediately, you might not have access to the veilid-cli command for a few minutes.