Importing Existing Infrastructure into Terraform — Step by Step

This blog post was originally published at Spacelift.

In this tutorial, you will learn ways to import pre-existing cloud resources before you continue to develop the IaC in Terraform. This guide will provide you with an IaC import scenario which is often faced by teams starting to adopt Terraform for their operations.

Why Import?

Terraform is a relatively new technology and adopting it to manage an organisation’s cloud resources might take some time and effort. The lack of human resources and the steep learning curve involved in using Terraform effectively causes teams to start using cloud infrastructure directly via their respective web consoles.

For that matter, any kind of IaC method (CloudFormation, Azure ARM templates, Pulumi, etc.) requires some training and real-time scenario handling experience. Things get especially complicated when dealing with concepts like states and remote backends. In a worst case scenario, you can lose the terraform.tfstate file. Luckily, you can use the import functionality to rebuild it.

Getting the pre-existing cloud resources under the Terraform management is facilitated by Terraform import. import is a Terraform CLI command which is used to read real-world infrastructure and update the state…