Terraform Plan Command: Examples, Tips and Best Practices

What is a Terraform Plan?

Terraform is a popular tool for managing infrastructure as code. It allows you to define and provision your resources in a declarative way, using a simple and human-readable language. But before you apply your configuration to create or update your infrastructure, you need to plan it. That's where Terraform Plan comes in and the topic of this blog post.

Video Walk-through

Our setup

Let's take a look at our setup.

Requirements

• A GitHub account (all the hands-on sections will utilize GitHub's Codespaces so you won't need to install anything on your machine)

The Terraform Plan Command

Before jumping into the code example, let's understand some of the concepts around the Terraform Plan command.

Terraform Plan is a command that shows you what Terraform will do before it actually does it. It compares your current state (the existing resources) with your desired state (the configuration file) and generates a plan of action to achieve it. The plan shows you which resources will be created, modified, or destroyed, and how their attributes will change.

Purpose of Terraform Plan

Terraform Plan aims to help you review and verify your configuration before applying it. It gives you a chance to catch any errors or inconsistencies in your terraform code, and to make sure that you are not making any unwanted changes to your infrastructure. It also helps you communicate and collaborate with your team members, by showing them what you intend to do and getting their feedback.

Why is Terraform Plan important?

Planning your infrastructure changes is very important. Let's first talk about the challenges that you may encounter when you don't plan then discuss the importance of running plans.

Challenges without planning

Without planning you may run into the following challenges:

• Run the risk of applying changes that are not intended or expected, which can cause errors, downtime, or security issues.
• May not be aware of the dependencies or conflicts between your resources, which can lead to failures or inconsistencies.
• May not be able to estimate the cost or the impact of your changes, which can affect your budget or your performance.

The Importance of Terraform Plan

Planning helps you:

• Avoid the challenges mentioned above by showing you exactly what Terraform will do and allowing you to review it before executing it.
• Ensure that your configuration is valid and consistent with your desired state and follows the best practices and conventions of Terraform.
• Optimize your resources and reduce waste by showing you what resources are no longer needed and can be removed.
• Improve your collaboration and transparency by sharing your plan with your team members and stakeholders and getting their approval before applying it.

Terraform Plan in Action

To see how Terraform Plan works in action, let's look at a few use case examples based on pulling an NGINX docker image and creating a docker container with this image.

Use Case Examples

Creation of a new resource

The process of creating a new resource is simple and we will take it one step at a time.

1. Write configuration files that define the resources and their attributes. Below you will see all the terraform files.

Here is the main.tf file:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    docker = {
      source  = "kreuzwerker/docker"
      version = "3.0.2"
    }
  }
}

provider "docker" {}

resource "docker_image" "nginx_image" {
  name = "${var.image_name}:${var.image_tag}"
}

resource "docker_container" "nginx_container" {
  name  = "web-server"
  image = docker_image.nginx_image.image_id
  ports {
    internal = var.internal_port
    external = var.external_port
  }
  restart = "always"
}

Then we have a variables.tf file that defines the following variables:

1. image_name
2. image_tag
3. internal_port
4. external_port

variable "image_name" {
  type        = string
  description = "The name of the Docker image"
}

variable "image_tag" {
  type        = string
  description = "The tag of the Docker image"
}

variable "internal_port" {
  type        = number
  description = "The internal port number for the container"
  default     = 80
}

variable "external_port" {
  type        = number
  description = "The external port number for the container"
  default     = 8080
}

We then have a terraform.tfvars file to assign the variable values.

image_name    = "nginx"
image_tag     = "1.23.3"
internal_port = 80
external_port = 8090

2. Run terraform init command to initialize the Terraform folder.

terraform init

3. Run the terraform plan command to see the execution plan and what resources will be created and how they will be configured.

terraform plan

4. Review the plan and confirm that it matches your expectations.
5. Run the terraform apply command to create the resources

terraform apply

Modification of an existing resource

Now let's say you want to modify the container's restart behavior from always restarting to restarting on-failure. Just modify the docker_container resource in the main.tf file as shown below.

resource "docker_container" "nginx_container" {
  name  = "web-server"
  image = docker_image.nginx_image.image_id
  ports {
    internal = var.internal_port
    external = var.external_port
  }
  restart = "on-failure"
}

terraform plan

Deletion of an existing resource

# resource "docker_container" "nginx_container" {
#   name  = "web-server"
#   image = docker_image.nginx_image.image_id
#   ports {
#     internal = var.internal_port
#     external = var.external_port
#   }
#   restart = "on-failure"
# }

terraform plan

terraform apply

Planning modes

1. Normal mode is the default mode. It compares the current state with the desired state and generates a plan of action to achieve it.

Refresh-only mode is a special mode that only refreshes the state without generating a plan of action.

terraform apply

docker rmi nginx:1.23.3

terraform plan -refresh-only

{
  "version": 4,
  "terraform_version": "1.4.6",
  "serial": 14,
  "lineage": "233d2971-7895-7cf7-a361-148f8ca4418d",
  "outputs": {},
  "resources": [
    {
      "mode": "managed",
      "type": "docker_image",
      "name": "nginx_image",
      "provider": "provider[\"registry.terraform.io/kreuzwerker/docker\"]",
      "instances": [
        {
          "schema_version": 0,
          "attributes": {
            "build": [],
            "force_remove": null,
            "id": "sha256:ac232364af842735579e922641ae2f67d5b8ea97df33a207c5ea05f60c63a92dnginx:1.23.3",
            "image_id": "sha256:ac232364af842735579e922641ae2f67d5b8ea97df33a207c5ea05f60c63a92d",
            "keep_locally": null,
            "name": "nginx:1.23.3",
            "platform": null,
            "pull_triggers": null,
            "repo_digest": "nginx@sha256:f4e3b6489888647ce1834b601c6c06b9f8c03dee6e097e13ed3e28c01ea3ac8c",
            "triggers": null
          },
          "sensitive_attributes": [],
          "private": "bnVsbA=="
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "check_results": []
}

terraform apply -refresh-only

{
  "version": 4,
  "terraform_version": "1.4.6",
  "serial": 15,
  "lineage": "233d2971-7895-7cf7-a361-148f8ca4418d",
  "outputs": {},
  "resources": [],
  "check_results": []
}

Planning options

1. The -out flag. This flag allows you to save the output of Terraform plan to a file.

terraform plan -out tfplan

terraform apply tfplan

2. The -target flag.
3. The -replace flag.

terraform plan -replace docker_container.nginx_container

terraform apply -replace docker_container.nginx_container

4. The -var and -var-file flags.

# image_name    = "nginx"
# image_tag     = "1.23.3"
# internal_port = 80
# external_port = 8081

terraform plan -var image_name=nginx -var image_tag=1.23.3

image_name    = "nginx"
image_tag     = "1.23.3"

terraform plan -var-file a_random_directory/my_variables_file.txt

5. The -destroy flag.

terraform plan -destroy

terraform apply -destroy

Resource Targeting

Resource targeting in Terraform is a feature that allows you to apply changes to only a subset of your infrastructure.

terraform plan -target aws_instance.web -target module.network

terraform apply

terraform plan

terraform plan -target docker_image.nginx_image

terraform apply -target docker_image.nginx_image

Best Practices

Conclusion

Terraform Plan is a powerful and useful command that lets you preview the changes that Terraform will make to your infrastructure before applying them. It helps you validate your configuration, avoid errors and unwanted changes, and collaborate with your team. In this blog post, we learned about the purpose and importance of Terraform Plan, and how to use it in different scenarios. We also saw how to save and apply a plan file, and how to use some of the options and flags that Terraform Plan supports. By using Terraform Plan, you can make your infrastructure as code more reliable, predictable, and transparent.