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How to use GCP Secret Manager to Manage your Secrets using Terraform

You are going to start building your first application in GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and the question popup into your mind: How am I going to manage my credentials and secrets?

There are several options, however in this story, we are going to use GCP Secret Manager, so we can securely store and access API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data from Terraform.

Note: all secrets we will be stored in clear text in the Terraform state file and you need to take security measures to protect it.

1. Prerequisites

This is the list of prerequisites required:

• GCP Subscription: If we don’t have a GCP subscription, we can create a free account at https://cloud.google.com before we start.
• GCP Service Account: is an identity used to authenticate to GCP. Check How to Create a Service Account for Terraform in GCP for instructions to create one.que
• Existing GCP Project: we need an existing GCP project to store our Secret Manager resources.

2. Enabling Secret Manager API (optional)

Before we can use the Secret Manager in our Terraform code, we will need to enable the Secret Manager API in…