»Import

Hands-on: Try the Import Terraform Configuration tutorial.

Terraform can import existing infrastructure resources. This functionality allows you take resources you created by some other means and bring them under Terraform management.

This is a great way to slowly transition infrastructure to Terraform, or to be able to be confident that you can use Terraform in the future if it potentially doesn't support every feature you need today.

Warning: Terraform expects that each remote object it is managing will be bound to only one resource address, which is normally guaranteed by Terraform itself having created all objects. If you import existing objects into Terraform, be careful to import each remote object to only one Terraform resource address. If you import the same object multiple times, Terraform may exhibit unwanted behavior. For more information on this assumption, see the State section.

Currently State Only

The current implementation of Terraform import can only import resources into the state. It does not generate configuration. A future version of Terraform will also generate configuration.

Because of this, prior to running terraform import it is necessary to write manually a resource configuration block for the resource, to which the imported object will be mapped.

While this may seem tedious, it still gives Terraform users an avenue for importing existing resources.

Terraform Cloud

When you use Terraform on the command line with Terraform Cloud, many commands (e.g., apply) run inside your Terraform Cloud environment. However, the import command runs locally, so it will not have access to information from Terraform Cloud. To successfully perform an import, you may need to set local variables equivalent to any remote workspace variables in Terraform Cloud.