Terraform and Azure's 'Required property policyRule not found in JSON'

While developing and testing a TF Azure module for policies and policy initiatives (sets) I’ve received the following error:

Error: creating/updating Policy Definition custom-policy-1: policy.DefinitionsClient#CreateOrUpdate: Failure responding to request: StatusCode=400 -- Original Error: autorest/azure: Service returned an error. Status=400 Code=InvalidRequestContent Message=The request content was invalid and could not be deserialized: Required property policyRule not found in JSON. Path properties, line 1, position 153

Prerequisites

• Terraform

Solution

Besides parameters make sure you have a policyRule set in place. It’s easy to miss out. For instance, you can have something like this:

resource "azurerm_policy_definition" "policy_storage_allow_blob_public_access" {
  name                 = var.name
  display_name         = var.display_name
  description          = var.description
  policy_type          = "Custom"
  mode                 = "Indexed"
  metadata             = jsonencode({
    category = "Security"
  })
  parameters = {
    parameter_name = {
      type     = "String"
      metadata = {
        description = "Example parameter"
      }
    }
  }
  policy_rule          = jsonencode({
    "if": {
      "allOf": [
        {
          "field": "type",
          "equals": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts"
        },
        {
          "not": {
            "field": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/allowBlobPublicAccess",
            "equals": "false"
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    "then": {
      "effect": "deny"
    }
  })
}

Conclusion

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