Destroy a Stack

We recommend destroying a Stack in phases to ensure HCP Terraform destroys your infrastructure safely. Destroy your Stack deployments before destroying the Stack itself to ensure you do not leave any unmanaged infrastructure behind.

Requirements

To destroy a Stack and delete or destroy a deployment in HCP Terraform, you must also be a member of a team with one of the following permissions:

• Organization-level Manage all projects
• Project-level Maintain or higher

Delete deployments

Before destroying a Stack, we recommend destroying your deployments to remove the resources that those deployments manage. Otherwise, the infrastructure managed by your Stack’s deployments can continue without destruction, and you will have to clean them up manually.

To destroy a deployment’s infrastructure, add the destroy argument to every deployment block in your deployment configuration file. The following example destroys the production deployment using the destroy argument:

deployment "production" {
  inputs = {
    region          = "us-west-2"
    instances       = 2
  }
  destroy = true
}

After uploading the updated deployment configuration file and approving the subsequent plan, HCP Terraform destroys any infrastructure for the production deployment.

After deleting all of a Stack's deployments, you can safely delete that Stack.

Delete a Stack

Before destroying a Stack in HCP Terraform, we strongly recommend deleting all of that Stack’s deployments. Once your Stack contains no deployments, you can delete a Stack by performing the following steps:

Begin by navigating to the Stack you want to interact with:

1. Sign in to HCP Terraform, and select the organization that contains your Stack.
2. In the navigation menu, click Projects under Manage.
3. Select the project containing your Stack.
4. Select Settings in the navigation menu.
5. Select Destruction and Deletion.
6. Click Delete stack <STACK_NAME>.
7. Enter delete in the confirmation modal, then click Delete Stack.

By following the steps above, you can forcefully delete a Stack without removing its deployments first. However, your Stack’s deletion does not affect Stack’s resources, so they continue without management, and you have to clean them up manually.