Terraform provider

The official OpenAI Terraform provider lets you manage OpenAI organization resources with infrastructure as code. The provider uses the Administration API to manage projects, users, groups, roles, service accounts, certificates, rate limits, spend alerts, and related project settings.

This guide creates an OpenAI project. Continue to the use-case guides for project access, service accounts, operational limits, project controls, and imports.

Before you begin

You need:

• Terraform 1.0 or later. The import examples require Terraform 1.5 or later.
• An OpenAI organization with permission to create an Admin API key.

Administration API endpoints require Admin API keys, which don’t work with non-administration OpenAI API endpoints. Store the key in an environment variable or a secrets manager. Don’t commit it to your Terraform configuration or source control.

Configure the provider

Create a new directory and add a main.tf file with the following configuration:

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terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.0"

  required_providers {
    openai = {
      source  = "openai/openai"
      version = ">= 1.0.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "openai" {}

resource "openai_project" "example" {
  name = "terraform-managed"
}

output "project_id" {
  value = openai_project.example.project_id
}

The version constraint allows provider version 1.0.0 and later. Review the provider releases before upgrading.

Set your Admin API key in the environment:

export OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY="<your-admin-api-key>"

The provider reads OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY by default. You can also set OPENAI_ORG_ID and OPENAI_PROJECT_ID to send the OpenAI-Organization and OpenAI-Project headers with API requests. When these optional variables aren’t set, OpenAI resolves the organization and project from the API key. Set them when you want to explicitly identify which organization or project your Terraform configuration manages. See the provider configuration reference for all available arguments.

Initialize and apply

Initialize the working directory, then format and check the configuration:

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terraform init
terraform fmt
terraform validate

Terraform downloads the provider and creates .terraform.lock.hcl. Commit the lock file to source control so future runs select the same provider version. Run terraform init -upgrade to select the latest provider version allowed by the constraint.

Review the changes Terraform will make:

terraform plan

The plan should show one openai_project resource to add. Apply the configuration only after you have reviewed the plan:

terraform apply

Confirm the apply when prompted. Terraform creates the project and prints its ID from the project_id output.

Choose a use-case guide

For individual arguments and import formats, use the provider resource and data source reference.