How to work with JSON

Terraform
2

Hi @JustLeo,

If this JSON file is something you intend to include as part of your Terraform configuration (e.g. checked in to version control alongside the .tf files) then you can load the data structure from it into Terraform using the file function and the jsondecode function.

For the sake of example, I’ll show it loaded into a Local Value, which could then be referenced elsewhere in the configuration:

locals {
  json_data = jsondecode(file("${path.module}/data.json"))
}

The path.module reference here evaluates to the directory containing the .tf file where this expression is written, and the file must exist and contain valid JSON at the time Terraform is initially loading and validating the configuration.

Since you didn’t give any specific example of what this JSON file might contain and what you might want to do with it, it’s hard to show a real-world example of using this, but let’s say that the JSON file contains the following:

{
  "environment_name": "staging"
}

We could use that environment_name property as part of an AWS EC2 VPC tag name, like this:

resource "aws_vpc" "example" {
  # (other settings)

  tags = {
    Name = local.json_data.environment_name
  }
}
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