Terraform Imports

Another short post

Recently I did some work manually in the AWS Console. After some consideration and reflecting, I found that it would have been better if this infrastructure was documented and in code.

To set it up I just need to set up a terraform file with the resources I wanted like so:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "the-bucket" {
 # random comment
}

resource "aws_cloudfront_distribution" "the-cloudfront-distribution" {
 # random comment
}

Then to import the resouce into a terraform state file and convert to terraform syntax:

terraform init
terraform import aws_s3_bucket.the-bucket name-of-bucket
terraform import aws_cloudfront_distribution.the-cloudfront-distribution cf-name
terraform show -no-color > my-resource.tf

Now if you check my-resource.tf you will see your imported resources along with any related resources needed to fully provision the resource.

You may have issues if you are trying to import while you already have a remote backend (most likely s3). If that is the case, you can add the lovely -ignore-remote-version flag.

All Done!