Wildcard Importing Existing Resources

Terraform
1

I have some 1000+ DNS records across several tf files in a single cloud workspace. It’s come time to break these up into a number of individual projects however I’m stumped as to how to best distribute the state across the 30-40~ new workspaces this will create.

Ideally, I’m looking for a tool that’ll import resources that already exist on the upstream API and recover the state from the larger state file? How should I go about this?

2

When I have been in similar “state split” scenarios, I have completely ruled out use of terraform import because it can only handle one resource instance at a time, and the quality of import implementation in various providers can be a bit variable.

I have found two techniques which can be useful:

The first is built around terraform state rm:

  1. Make copies of the source state file for each destination state file
  2. On each destination state file, use terraform state rm to remove all the resources that shouldn’t end up in that split.
  3. Use a custom script to reset the "lineage" value in each destination state to a new UUID (so that in future, the “You’re uploading the wrong state to this workspace” check can tell the split workspaces apart.)
  4. Upload new state files to the destination workspaces.

The second technique is just a variation:

Write a custom script that does all of the state processing using direct JSON manipulation, instead of terraform state rm.