DEV Community

Spacelift team for Spacelift

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at spacelift.io

Terraform archive_file in Practice

The archive_file data source is a handy way to package artifacts (ZIP/TAR) from local files or directories during a Terraform workflow — commonly for things like Lambda/function bundles, config payloads, or upload-ready assets. It also exposes checksums so you can trigger updates cleanly when the archive content changes.

In the full guide, we cover:

  • Creating archives from a single file vs an entire directory
  • Using output hashes/checksums to drive deployments reliably
  • Common errors and troubleshooting (conflicting inputs, missing files, unexpected diffs)
  • CI/CD caveats: archives are built during plan, so you need to ensure the artifact is available at apply time in multi-phase pipelines

➡️ Read the full article on our blog:

https://spacelift.io/blog/terraform-archive-file

Top comments (0)