Getting Started With Mikrotik and Terraform | Mircea Anton

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Getting Started With Mikrotik and Terraform | Mircea Anton

Adopting your Mikrotik router to Terraform for automation and management.

https://mirceanton.com/posts/mikrotik-terraform-getting-started/

[0lzi]

Amazing work

[mircea-pavel-anton]

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful

[SoareCristi]

Great and (very) detailed work!

However, I found myself questioning, why did you import (or create) some resources with their default values?
For example routeros_ip_address.lan, is there any other reason apart from making it possible to reference it in other resources?

Another way to explain it would be to make sure it goes back to what value you're used to, but it's unlikely that one would change the IP address of the router by mistake in this case

[mircea-pavel-anton]

Thanks! Glad you found this helpful

You've pretty much nailed it. It's primarily about ensuring complete IaC adoption. By importing even "default" resources, I can guarantee that my Terraform state is a 1:1 representation of the device's actual configuration. This way, my git repo becomes the single source of truth, and I don't have to wonder whether some setting was manually tweaked outside of Terraform.

As for managing the router's management IP specifically, you're right that it's a bit of an edge case. It's actually a two-step operation: you apply the config, the API call goes through to update the address, and then the apply fails because Terraform loses its connection mid-operation. After that, you update the provider configuration with the new address and run another apply to let Terraform catch up.

Not the smoothest workflow, but it works!