Intro

I was trying to run Terraform commands in a directory that I’d previously used with TF with no issues, but today I got the following error:

Error: No valid credential sources found for AWS Provider. Please see https://terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/index.html for more information on providing credentials for the AWS Provider

This is weird. The profile config was correct and I’d just used this yesterday.

To help troubleshoot, I set the TF_LOG environment variable¹:

export TF_LOG=trace

and re-run to see this error:

[ERR] Checkpoint error: Get https://checkpoint-api.hashicorp.com/v1/check/terraform?arch=amd64&os=darwin&signature=7d7875a0-4705-7036-83f0-6786da79caa5&version=0.12.13: net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)

…so the actual issue is some kind of timeout.

When I open the HTTPS link in my browser, the request succeeds with a JSON response, so the server isn’t down.

Searching around, I found some GitHub issues that indicate this is a DNS issue with the Terraform version or the Go library that handles DNS. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling my version of Terraform (0.12.13) but that didn’t help.

Here’s the answer

Finally, I figured it was probably an issue with my DNS server at home, which is a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole. Sure enough, I tried logging in to the admin web console and got some error messages saying that the FTL service wasn’t running.

I SSHed into my Raspberry Pi as an admin user (usually pi) and ran the following to restart the service:

sudo systemctl restart pihole-FTL

After that, I was able to successfully run Terraform commands such as init and plan.

For good measure, I also logged into the admin console and restarted the DNS service.

Notes

I’m not sure why this happened! I had checked it earlier that day, actually disabling it and re-enabling it for a page that used some tracking that I needed access to. I’ll have to watch it more closely, but now I know that if this Checkpoint error comes up in Terraform it’s probably my Raspberry Pi.