A common pattern that emerges when using @HashiCorp #Terraform is to have many types of policies inlined using a heredoc. This is frustrating as it means you can't use standard tools to validate and/or format these JSON policies.
gist.github.com/nhandler/97f55… is my attempt at a solution to this problem. All of your policies get defined as standalone JSON files within a templates/ directory. This makes it easy to copy from other tools (or even web consoles) and validate/format the contents.
A template_file is used to facilitate the use of variables, which are a great way to avoid ending up with magic numbers or hardcoded values in your policies. And a list of filenames is used to avoid having to declare multiple template_files and duplicate the list of variables.
Finally, access to the policy is keyed on the template filename, making it immediately clear which policy is being used and making the order of the list of filenames irrelevant. As a bonus, this approach significantly shrinks the size of your Terraform files.
