How to set the virtual machine image details e.g. publisher, offer, sku and version

I have a Terraform script that creates a Virtual Machine on Azure based on this image from the Azure Marketplace: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/gitlab.gitlab-ce

But I don't know how to identify the values to put in these fields:

• publisher
• offer
• sku
• version

This is a snippet from the Terraform script

resource "azurerm_virtual_machine" "gitlab_vm" {
  # ... other configuration

  storage_image_reference {
    publisher = "GitLab"
    offer     = "GitLab Community Edition"
    # sku       = "???"
    version   = "latest"
  }

  # ... other configuration
}

If I run the previous details with terraform plan and e.g. publisher = "GitLabXXX" (something that does not exist), then Terraform does not raise any error. When I run terraform apply after a while an error is raised and the VM resource is not created (although all the other resources e.g. the networking stuff are created).

This applies in a similar way to Azure ARM templates:

"imageReference": {
    "publisher": "[variables('pubName')]",
    "offer": "[variables('offerName')]",
    "sku" : "[parameters('skuName')]",
    "version":"latest"
},

I have some virtual machine that are up and running with a similar Terraform configuration that I found on the internet (see the Ubuntu example below), but what are the rules to translate the information from the Azure Marketplace webpage to the script?

  storage_image_reference {
    publisher = "Canonical"
    offer     = "UbuntuServer"
    sku       = "16.04-LTS"
    version   = "latest"
  }

There may be a more efficient way to do this, but I typically use the Azure CLI to get the publisher, offer, SKU, and version. First, if you do something like:

az vm image list --offer GitLab -o table --all

You'll get back a list with the offer, publisher, SKU, URN, and Version. In your case, it should be something like this for gitlab-ce:

• Publisher: gitlab
• Offer: gitlab-ce
• SKU: gitlab-ce
• Version: 1.0.4

I'm pretty sure the azurerm provider just calls ARM with these values so it should match what you get from the CLI, though I can certainly be corrected on this if I'm mistaken.

You'll also need to include a plan block. The details for that can be retrieved via the CLI with something like this:

az vm image show --location westus --urn gitlab:gitlab-ce:gitlab-ce:1.0.4 -o json

So your plan block would look something like:

plan {
  name = "gitlab-ce" 
  publisher = "gitlab"
  product = "gitlab-ce"
}