Support for Refactoring

[jasonkuhrt]

After using terraform for around ten days and discussing different features/workflows with various people in IRC it has become clear that there is no support for refactoring in Terraform. Quote:

09:47 jedineeper: jasonkuhrt: painful :) very painful :)
– @jedineeper

The suggestions I got were:

1. "tear it down and redeploy it in the new module/code"
2. "spent a lot more time on a whiteboard sketching out dependencies"
3. "hacking out some tfstate"

All essentially unacceptable. Even 2 which sounds reasonable is not an admissible replacement for plainly missing refactoring features.

The main issue I have run into is that when I encapsulate (a) resource(s) into a module terraform is unable to resolve the existing state with the new graph.

[phinze]

Hi there - totally agreed that the current state of the world is unacceptable. We've been discussing this over in #591 - check out the ideas for features to help support refactoring over there.

Closing this to keep the conversation rooted over there - feel free to join in!

[jasonkuhrt]

Ah thanks! Sorry for the dupe.

[ghost]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

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