Terraform Import from AWS

I came accross an issue by a customer using aws and terraform. He created a server with ebs volume attached to it but he deleted the volume by mistake.

He then recreated it manually without using the terraform to do it. Thus, the tfstate wasn’t up to date with the new volume and when executing the terraform plan it wanted to create a new volume withe the same name and everything.
So you’ll find the different steps in this blog to re-import the existing volume in the existing terraform tfstate.

We will use terraform in command line directly. I suppose that the path to your tfstate is well set in your .tf file, if you have it localy or in s3 doesn’t matter.

For this blog I’ll use the following resource declarations:
– EBS Volume Resource: aws_ebs_volume.inst-name-volume
– EBS Volume ID: vol-id_of_the_volume
– EBS Attachement Resource: aws_volume_attachment.inst-name-attachement
– Ec2 Instance ID: i-id_of_the_aws_instance

If you execute the plan you’ll find which resource it will try to create:

If the resource names are the same between the ones already in your tfstate and the ones you want to import, you’ll have to remove it from your tfstate as the import cannot update the current configuration.

Here the command to list all your declared resources:

Here the command to remove the desired resources (ebs volume + attachement):

You can now import the existing ebs volume and attachement:

The result of the commands should be successful, if so, you can list the declared resources:

And if you execute the plan again, you should see no change, up to date:

Note that you can do it for an ec2 instance as well simply with:

I hope it helped you, if you have any questions do not hesitate in the comments below.