How to disable parts of resources in terraform?

[egul...@gmail.com]

Hello everyone,

Is it possible to disable parts of infrastructure in terraform without actually destroying resources?

Commenting out items in .ml files doesn't work because 'tf plan' & 'tf apply' will destroy resources.

Have someone resolved similar issue in different way? Modifying state file maybe?

If we split our infrastructure into using modules, can we turn off some modules from terraform (so state doesn't see it) temporarily and later enable them?



Any advice appreciated,
Thank you

[Lowe Schmidt]

In what provider? And how would you accomplish this without terraform? 

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Lowe Schmidt | +46 723 867 157

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[Martin Atkins]

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here, but I think what you're getting at is that you want Terraform to temporarily ignore certain resources while still keeping track of them so you can continue using them in Terraform later.

If so, the closest feature to that today is the -target argument accepted on the terraform plan and terraform apply (with no arguments) commands. This actually does the opposite of what I think you want here: it asks Terraform to focus its attention only on the resources that are targeted:

terraform plan -out=tfplan -target=aws_instance.foo -target=aws_route53_record.foo

When using -target, Terraform will not do any semantic validation, refreshing, planning or applying on any resource except those that you explicitly name and any resources that are dependencies of those targets.

[ja...@fpcomplete.com]

On Friday, September 23, 2016 at 1:25:01 PM UTC-4, egul...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

Is it possible to disable parts of infrastructure in terraform without actually destroying resources?

Commenting out items in .ml files doesn't work because 'tf plan' & 'tf apply' will destroy resources.

It sounds like you are looking for the `-target` parameter, were the `tf plan` and `tf apply` will focus on specific resources. It would work for most cases, at least. I find `-target` fails to work properly in some cases, particularly with modules. Specifying one or more resources within a module sometimes works for me, targeting an entire module fails to work as expected, and sometimes using target seems to confuse Terraform's understanding of variables.. but those issues that aside, `-target` works really great.

In regards to refactoring and modules and that sort of thing.. you are sometimes better off removing and recreating the resources, but you might also be able to remove the resources from your TF state and then import the existing (but now "unknown") resource into a specific location within a module, though I haven't tested or used that extensively.

[pau...@gliffy.com]

I think what you're looking for is the `terraform state rm` command: https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/state/rm.html.

On Friday, September 23, 2016 at 10:25:01 AM UTC-7, egul...@gmail.com wrote: