Destruction plan on Terraform Cloud

Terraform HCP Terraform
1

Hi

Is it possible to create a destruction plan for a workspace in Terraform Cloud?

I have some resources that I marked to prevent destroy, but when I destroy the resources it fails because of that.

I want to destroy only specific components but I can’t find a way to set up the plan.

1 Like
2

Same here. The destroy and prevent_destroy features are confusing to me.

When marking a resource prevent_destroy = true I would except terraform destroy to destroy everything not related to this resource.

3

Is it possible to create a destruction plan for a workspace in Terraform Cloud?

It is, yes.

  • You can run terraform destroy on the command line using the remote backend.
  • You can also manually queue up a destroy plan in the Terraform Cloud UI in workspace Settings → Destruction and Deletion:

image
image1684×1396 285 KB

Note that in both of these cases, with Terraform Cloud you must also have “Allow destroy plans” toggled (this is on by default, but allows administrators to prevent complete destruction of infrastructure without configuration changes)

More importantly though:

When marking a resource prevent_destroy = true I would [expect] terraform destroy to destroy everything not related to this resource.

This is not how prevent_destroy works, sadly - if you have resources with this on, any destroy plan will fail. See the documentation on this feature; note this is not specific to Terraform Cloud, this is a regular OSS feature in Terraform CLI.

I want to destroy only specific components but I can’t find a way to set up the plan.

To do this, you would remove the configuration for the component in question and run terraform apply. Terraform will create a plan to destroy the component you removed. You’re declaring that you no longer want that component to exist in your infrastructure by removing it from your configuration.

1 Like