Use Cora as a Remote Backend

Prerequisites

• A Cora account enrolled in our design partner or beta program.
• An active API token created from /tokens. Tokens inherit your current organization and are required for CLI auth.
• Terraform CLI version v1.1.0 or later.

Step 1 — Login with Terraform CLI

Start with terraform login thecora.app. Terraform stores the token in ~/.terraform.d/credentials.tfrc.json and reuses it for backend requests to thecora.app.

$ terraform login thecora.app
Terraform will request an API token for thecora.app using your browser.

If login is successful, Terraform will store the token in plain text in
the following file for use by subsequent commands:
    /Users/gabe/.terraform.d/credentials.tfrc.json

Do you want to proceed?
  Only 'yes' will be accepted to confirm.

Need to rotate the token? Re-run terraform login with the same hostname—Terraform will overwrite the credential entry.

Step 2 — Configure the remote backend block

Add a remote backend configuration that mirrors Terraform Cloud. Replace organization with your Cora organization slug (visible in the account menu) and workspace with the Terraform workspace name you want to target.

terraform {
  backend "remote" {
    hostname     = "thecora.app"
    organization = "AcmeCorp"

    workspaces {
      name = "networking-prod"
    }
  }
}

• hostname must be thecora.app.
• organization must match the slug stored on your token; you can confirm this in /account.
• Workspace names are free-form; Cora will create them on first upload if they do not exist.

Step 3 — Initialize the backend

Run terraform init. Terraform negotiates backend settings using standard remote backend endpoints.

$ terraform init
Initializing the backend...
Successfully configured the backend "remote"!

Step 4 — Upload your state

Once initialized, run terraform apply to upload your current state to Cora. This ensures your local state is synchronized with the remote backend and visible in the dashboard.

$ terraform apply
...
Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Cora enforces the organization slug on every state upload, lock, and download request. If you see an organization mismatch error, confirm the backend block and token were created for the same slug.

Verifying uploads in Cora

After a successful command, open /home and filter by the workspace you configured. New uploads appear within a few seconds. You can also inspect the raw state version metadata at /api/v2/workspaces/<workspaceId>/current-state-version when authenticated.

Frequently asked questions