State
Objective
Understand the basics of Terraform state.
Overview
Terraform tracks resources and all of their properties in a state file. The state is how Terraform knows what should be deployed at any given time. State can be stored locally in a project or remotely in backends. As they are critical to the operation of Terraform and Terraform projects are often collaborative, it is usually best to put them in a remote backend. This also enables features like state locking to allow multiple users to work on a project at the same time. Since this lab is covering basics and not meant to be collaborative we will be storing state locally so that we can examine it. State is not meant to be edited manually. In the event that changes need to be made there are CLI commands that work with both local and remote state.
Lab
In this lab we will generate a state file and explore it.
Apply current project
Up until now we have not applied our config. We need to do this before a state file will be created.
Execute
terraform apply
Answer ‘yes’ when prompted.
Explore the terraform.statefile
Now that we have applied our configuration we can see a new file created, terraform.tfstate. The state is plain text and in json format so it can be opened with a text editor.
Spend a moment reviewing this simple state file.
Review
In this lab we applied our configuration for the first time and examined the state file that was created.