terraform refresh should show output?

[pearkes]

Would be cool to see what has been refreshed after it completes.

[mitchellh]

Hm, everything is refreshed but there is "diff" that is done. It would be cool to see this I imagine though.

[pearkes]

Ah totally, as in what was updated in the state. Would definitely be good to see that.

[mitchellh]

Whoops sorry I meant to say there is no diff that is done. But since the attributes in a ResourceState are map[string]string it would be pretty trivial to add a diffing feature to this.

[MrJoy]

So, it seems that terraform refresh does not manage to discover existing resources that are described by the configuration. I.E. if I have an existing AWS account and I want to create a configuration that describes what's already there, refresh ignores those resources and then plan/apply wind up doing the wrong thing.

Am I missing something here? Also, how permanent is this state file supposed to be? Should it be versioned? Shouldn't it be possible to recreate it from scratch, for at least the purely-declarative stuff? Is it possible to use AWS tags to capture state information that would make collaborative manipulation of the infrastructure less error-prone?

[pearkes]

@MrJoy You have a few questions, so answering individually:

I have an existing AWS account and I want to create a configuration that describes what's already there

Check out the recent mailing list post on the topic. Short answer: describing existing infra is coming.

Also, how permanent is this state file supposed to be?

Very permanent. State contains the only information about where your infrastructure is. It is how Terraform can manage resources. The most important thing in there is the type of resource and ID. Most everything else can be retrieved via the provider logic.

Is it possible to use AWS tags to capture state information that would make collaborative manipulation of the infrastructure less error-prone?

This is an important thing to think about. Right now, we recommend putting your Terraform configuration and state in version control (keeping in mind security concerns, that can be covered in a separate topic). VCS can make collaborative manipulation sane, as it does for code!

Leaving this open as the bug itself is still relevant.

[MrJoy]

All good to know, thank you.

Given that the state is binary, how is collaboration meant to work in context of parallel operators? Will it be moving to a textual format to facilitate merging, or will there be tooling to handle this as, say, a git merge handler?