Terraform: How to Use Conditionals to Dynamically Create Resources

…don’t struggle looking for if/else statements, you won’t find them…

Photo by Himesh Kumar Behera on Unsplash

As you (probably) know, Terraform doesn’t support if statements.
Luckily we can achieve the same result by using a specific parameter called count.

You can think about it this way: you can set count to 1 on a specific resource and get one copy of that resource.

However, setting the same count parameter to 0 you won’t get any resource created.

So, as already mentioned, you won’t need if/else statements at all, Terraform use conditional expressions with the following format:

<CONDITION> ? <TRUE_VAL> <FALSE_VAL>

All that Terraform does is nothing but evaluating the boolean logic in CONDITION and, based on that, if the value is true it will return TRUE_VAL otherwise it’ll return FALSE_VAL if the result is false.

Just to give you some contest, we’re migrating our existing AWS infrastructure (Ansible&Boto3 deployed) in Terraform.

This particular example is referred to ELB creation with a target group and a listener.
is taken from a migration project I’m currently working on and it will practically show what I’ve just…