Terraform plan fails with tfe-agent failed to load image – HashiCorp Help Center

The task-worker is failing with a "permission denied" error during driver initialization, which prevents it from pulling the agent image: hashicorp/tfe-agent

Error:failed pulling image "hashicorp/tfe-agent:now": Error response from daemon: {"message":"denied: requested access to the resource is denied"}

Possible Causes for Agent Image Pull Failure

Several factors could contribute to this issue:

1. Invalid License

An invalid or misconfigured license may prevent access to the image registry.

To validate the license, run:

echo "<HASHICORP_LICENSE>" | docker login --username terraform images.releases.hashicorp.com --password-stdin
docker --debug pull hashicorp/tfe-agent:latest

2. Insufficient Disk Space

The most common cause is insufficient space under the /var directory, where Podman stores container data. You may encounter an error similar to:

Error response from daemon: failed to load image: payload does not match any of the supported image formats:
 * oci: open /var/tmp/api_load.tarXXXX/index.json: not a directory
 * oci-archive: creating temp directory: untarring file "/var/tmp/container_images_ociXXXX": 
   write ... no space left on device

Solution:

Increase the /var partition size to at least 40GB
Ensure /var or specifically /var/lib/containers/storage has sufficient space for Podman image operation
A minimum of 40GB is recommended for stable Terraform Enterprise operations.

Redeploy Terraform Enterprise

Use the following commands to bring down and restart the terraform enterprise deployment as per the platform below is the example for podman deployment :

podman kube down /path/to/yaml
podman play kube /path/to/yaml

Additional Information

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cloud-docs/agents/agents