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Sree Lasya Vallabhaneni
Sree Lasya Vallabhaneni

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How to move items in terraform state without force replacement

I have started working on terraform very recently, One of the biggest annoying factors was when you have to change the terraform state without a forced replacement of the resource.

Terraform remembers a state which is nothing but how the infrastructure looks in the remote real world and in the local configuration.
So when you change a few attributes in the resource like name of the resource, instances, modules which are already created, in the plan it specifies that as not an in-place change

Thankfully there is a command that my colleague has mentioned is "mv"

This command is nothing but like a Linux mv command.

You need to specify source and destination:

terraform state mv aws_subnet.main aws_subnet-us-west-2c

This will move the existing terraform state to an updated terraform state and when you run a terraform plan, you should not see any infrastructure changes if done correctly.

For more information, you can refer: https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/state/mv.html

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