Read Terraform's plan the better way
Published in
2 min readDec 19, 2022
Last year, I started exploring, and studying terraform for work. While studying, I mostly relied on Terraform plan command to check the output plan.
As terraform module I was writing got bigger, the plan got bigger too, and I needed to store the plan in a file and then read & analyse the file later.
For example, I want to read the plan for the following resource & store it in a file,
resource "null_resource" "hello_world"{
provisioner "local-exec" {
command = "echo \"hello world\""
}
}Like any Linux user, I ran the following command,
terraform plan > planfileand then
because look at this file,
An execution plan has been generated and is shown below.
Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
[32m+[0m create
[0m
Terraform will perform the following actions:
[1m # null_resource.hello_world[0m will be created[0m[0m
[0m [32m+[0m[0m resource "null_resource" "hello_world" {
[32m+[0m [0m[1m[0mid[0m[0m = (known after apply)
}[0m[1mPlan:[0m 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.[0m------------------------------------------------------------------------Note: You didn't specify an "-out" parameter to save this plan, so Terraform
can't guarantee that exactly these actions will be performed if
"terraform apply" is subsequently run.
After a lot of googling, I came across this life-changing flag,
terraform plan -no-color > planfileand my life became easy and simple as it was before:
An execution plan has been generated and is shown below.
Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
+ createTerraform will perform the following actions:
# null_resource.hello_world will be created
+ resource "null_resource" "hello_world" {
+ id = (known after apply)
}Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.------------------------------------------------------------------------Note: You didn't specify an "-out" parameter to save this plan, so Terraform
can't guarantee that exactly these actions will be performed if
"terraform apply" is subsequently run.
I hope this helps and makes your life a bit easy.
Happy Terraforming!!!
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