Importing Existing Infrastructure into Terraform — Step by Step

Terraform is a relatively new technology and adopting it to manage an organisation’s cloud resources might take some time and effort. The lack of human resources and the steep learning curve involved in using Terraform effectively causes teams to start using cloud infrastructure directly via their respective web consoles.

For that matter, any kind of IaC method (CloudFormation, Azure ARM templates, Pulumi, etc.) requires some training and real-time scenario handling experience. Things get especially complicated when dealing with concepts like states and remote backends. In a worst case scenario, you can lose the terraform.tfstate file. Luckily, you can use the import functionality to rebuild it.

Getting the pre-existing cloud resources under the Terraform management is facilitated by Terraform import. import is a Terraform CLI command which is used to read real-world infrastructure and update the state, so that future updates to the same set of infrastructure can be applied via IaC.

The import functionality helps update the state locally and it does not create the corresponding configuration automatically. However, the in upcoming releases. Terraform team is working hard to improve this function

Originally published at https://spacelift.io.