Terraform
Import: tfplan
Warning: The tfplan
import is now deprecated and will be permanently removed in August 2025.
We recommend that you start using the updated tfplan/v2 import as soon as possible to avoid disruptions.
The tfplan/v2
import offers improved functionality and is designed to better support your policy enforcement needs.
The tfplan
import provides access to a Terraform plan. A Terraform plan is the
file created as a result of terraform plan
and is the input to terraform
apply
. The plan represents the changes that Terraform needs to make to
infrastructure to reach the desired state represented by the configuration.
In addition to the diff data available in the plan, there is an
applied
state available that merges the plan with the state
to create the planned state after apply.
Finally, this import also allows you to access the configuration files and the Terraform state at the time the plan was run. See the section on accessing a plan's state and configuration data for more information.
Note: HCP Terraform Free Edition includes one policy set of up to five policies. In HCP Terraform Plus Edition, you can connect a policy set to a version control repository or create policy set versions via the API. Refer to HCP Terraform pricing for details.
Namespace Overview
The following is a tree view of the import namespace. For more detail on a particular part of the namespace, see below.
Note that the root-level alias keys shown here (data
, path
, and
resources
) are shortcuts to a module namespace scoped to
the root module. For more details, see the section on root namespace
aliases.
tfplan
├── module() (function)
│ └── (module namespace)
│ ├── path ([]string)
│ ├── data
│ │ └── TYPE.NAME[NUMBER]
│ │ ├── applied (map of keys)
│ │ └── diff
│ │ └── KEY
│ │ ├── computed (bool)
│ │ ├── new (string)
│ │ └── old (string)
│ └── resources
│ └── TYPE.NAME[NUMBER]
│ ├── applied (map of keys)
│ ├── destroy (bool)
│ ├── requires_new (bool)
│ └── diff
│ └── KEY
│ ├── computed (bool)
│ ├── new (string)
│ └── old (string)
├── module_paths ([][]string)
├── terraform_version (string)
├── variables (map of keys)
│
├── data (root module alias)
├── path (root module alias)
├── resources (root module alias)
│
├── config (tfconfig namespace alias)
└── state (tfstate import alias)
Namespace: Root
The root-level namespace consists of the values and functions documented below.
In addition to this, the root-level data
, path
, and resources
keys alias
to their corresponding namespaces or values within the module
namespace.
Accessing a Plan's State and Configuration Data
The config
and state
keys alias to the tfconfig
and
tfstate
namespaces, respectively, with the data sourced from
the Terraform plan (as opposed to actual configuration and state).
Note that these aliases are not represented as maps. While they will appear empty when viewed as maps, the specific import namespace keys will still be accessible.
Note that while current versions of HCP Terraform source configuration and
state data from the plan for the Terraform run in question, future versions may
source data accessed through the tfconfig
and tfstate
imports (as opposed to
tfplan.config
and tfplan.state
) from actual config bundles, or state as
stored by HCP Terraform. When this happens, the distinction here will be useful -
the data in the aliased namespaces will be the config and state data as the
plan sees it, versus the actual "physical" data.
Function: module()
module = func(ADDR)
- Return Type: A module namespace.
The module()
function in the root namespace returns the
module namespace for a particular module address.
The address must be a list and is the module address, split on the period (.
),
excluding the root module.
Hence, a module with an address of simply foo
(or root.foo
) would be
["foo"]
, and a module within that (so address foo.bar
) would be read as
["foo", "bar"]
.
null
is returned if a module address is invalid, or if the module
is not present in the diff.
As an example, given the following module block:
module "foo" {
# ...
}
If the module contained the following content:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.module(["foo"]).resources.null_resource.foo[0].applied.triggers.foo is "bar" }
Value: module_paths
- Value Type: List of a list of strings.
The module_paths
value within the root namespace is a list
of all of the modules within the Terraform diff for the current plan.
Modules not present in the diff will not be present here, even if they are present in the configuration or state.
This data is represented as a list of a list of strings, with the inner list
being the module address, split on the period (.
).
The root module is included in this list, represented as an empty inner list, as long as there are changes.
As an example, if the following module block was present within a Terraform configuration:
module "foo" {
# ...
}
The value of module_paths
would be:
[
[],
["foo"],
]
And the following policy would evaluate to true
:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.module_paths contains ["foo"] }
Note the above example only applies if the module is present in the diff.
Iterating Through Modules
Iterating through all modules to find particular resources can be useful. This
example shows how to use module_paths
with the
module()
function to find all resources of a
particular type from all modules that have pending changes using the tfplan
import.
Value: terraform_version
- Value Type: String.
The terraform_version
value within the root namespace
represents the version of Terraform used to create the plan. This can be used to
enforce a specific version of Terraform in a policy check.
As an example, the following policy would evaluate to true
, as long as the
plan was made with a version of Terraform in the 0.11.x series, excluding any
pre-release versions (example: -beta1
or -rc1
):
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.terraform_version matches "^0\\.11\\.\\d+$" }
Value: variables
- Value Type: A string-keyed map of values.
The variables
value within the root namespace represents
all of the variables that were set when creating the plan. This will only
contain variables set for the root module.
Note that unlike the default
value in the
tfconfig
variables namespace, primitive values
here are stringified, and type conversion will need to be performed to perform
comparison for int, float, or boolean values. This only applies to variables
that are primitives themselves and not primitives within maps and lists, which
will be their original types.
If a default was accepted for the particular variable, the default value will be populated here.
As an example, given the following variable blocks:
variable "foo" {
default = "bar"
}
variable "number" {
default = 42
}
variable "map" {
default = {
foo = "bar"
number = 42
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
, if no values were entered to
change these variables:
import "tfplan"
default_foo = rule { tfplan.variables.foo is "bar" }
default_number = rule { tfplan.variables.number is "42" }
default_map_string = rule { tfplan.variables.map["foo"] is "bar" }
default_map_int = rule { tfplan.variables.map["number"] is 42 }
main = rule { default_foo and default_number and default_map_string and default_map_int }
Namespace: Module
The module namespace can be loaded by calling
module()
for a particular module.
It can be used to load the following child namespaces, in addition to the values documented below:
data
- Loads the resource namespace, filtered against data sources.resources
- Loads the resource namespace, filtered against resources.
Root Namespace Aliases
The root-level data
and resources
keys both alias to their corresponding
namespaces within the module namespace, loaded for the root module. They are the
equivalent of running module([]).KEY
.
Value: path
- Value Type: List of strings.
The path
value within the module namespace contains the
path of the module that the namespace represents. This is represented as a list
of strings.
As an example, if the following module block was present within a Terraform configuration:
module "foo" {
# ...
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
only if the diff had changes for
that module:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.module(["foo"]).path contains "foo" }
Namespace: Resources/Data Sources
The resource namespace is a namespace type that applies to both resources
(accessed by using the resources
namespace key) and data sources (accessed
using the data
namespace key).
Accessing an individual resource or data source within each respective namespace
can be accomplished by specifying the type, name, and resource number (as if the
resource or data source had a count
value in it) in the syntax
[resources|data].TYPE.NAME[NUMBER]
. Note that NUMBER is always needed, even if
you did not use count
in the resource.
In addition, each of these namespace levels is a map, allowing you to filter based on type and name.
The (somewhat strange) notation here of TYPE.NAME[NUMBER]
may imply that
the inner resource index map is actually a list, but it's not - using the square
bracket notation over the dotted notation (TYPE.NAME.NUMBER
) is required here
as an identifier cannot start with a number.
Some examples of multi-level access are below:
- To fetch all
aws_instance.foo
resource instances within the root module, you can specifytfplan.resources.aws_instance.foo
. This would then be indexed by resource count index (0
,1
,2
, and so on). Note that as mentioned above, these elements must be accessed using square-bracket map notation (so[0]
,[1]
,[2]
, and so on) instead of dotted notation. - To fetch all
aws_instance
resources within the root module, you can specifytfplan.resources.aws_instance
. This would be indexed from the names of each resource (foo
,bar
, and so on), with each of those maps containing instances indexed by resource count index as per above. - To fetch all resources within the root module, irrespective of type, use
tfplan.resources
. This is indexed by type, as shown above withtfplan.resources.aws_instance
, with names being the next level down, and so on.
When resource targeting is in effect, tfplan.resources
will only include the resources specified as targets for the run. This may lead to unexpected outcomes if a policy expects a resource to be present in the plan. To prohibit targeted runs altogether, ensure tfrun.target_addrs
is undefined or empty.
Further explanation of the namespace will be in the context of resources. As
mentioned, when operating on data sources, use the same syntax, except with
data
in place of resources
.
Value: applied
- Value Type: A string-keyed map of values.
The applied
value within the resource
namespace contains a "predicted"
representation of the resource's state post-apply. It's created by merging the
pending resource's diff on top of the existing data from the resource's state
(if any). The map is a complex representation of these values with data going
as far down as needed to represent any state values such as maps, lists, and
sets.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
if the resource was in the diff:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.foo[0].applied.triggers.foo is "bar" }
Note that some values will not be available in the applied
state because
they cannot be known until the plan is actually applied. In Terraform 0.11 or
earlier, these values are represented by a placeholder (the UUID value
74D93920-ED26-11E3-AC10-0800200C9A66
) and in Terraform 0.12 or later they
are undefined
. In either case, you should instead use the
computed
key within the diff
namespace to determine that a computed value will
exist.
If a resource is being destroyed, its applied
value is omitted from the
namespace and trying to fetch it will return undefined.
Value: diff
- Value Type: A map of diff namespaces.
The diff
value within the resource
namespace contains the diff for a particular
resource. Each key within the map links to a diff
namespace for that particular key.
Note that unlike the applied
value, this map is not complex;
the map is only 1 level deep with each key possibly representing a diff for a
particular complex value within the resource.
See the below section for more details on the diff namespace, in addition to usage examples.
Value: destroy
- Value Type: Boolean.
The destroy
value within the resource
namespace is true
if a resource is being
destroyed for any reason, including cases where it's being deleted as part of
a resource re-creation, in which case requires_new
will
also be set.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
when null_resource.foo
is being
destroyed:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.foo[0].destroy }
Value: requires_new
- Value Type: Boolean.
The requires_new
value within the resource
namespace is true
if the resource is still
present in the configuration, but must be replaced to satisfy its current diff.
Whenever requires_new
is true
, destroy
is also true
.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
if one of the triggers
in
null_resource.foo
was being changed:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.foo[0].requires_new }
Namespace: Resource Diff
The diff namespace is a namespace that represents the diff for a specific
attribute within a resource. For details on reading a particular attribute,
see the diff
value in the resource
namespace.
Value: computed
- Value Type: Boolean.
The computed
value within the diff namespace is
true
if the resource key in question depends on another value that isn't yet
known. Typically, that means the value it depends on belongs to a resource that
either doesn't exist yet, or is changing state in such a way as to affect the
dependent value so that it can't be known until the apply is complete.
Keep in mind that when using computed
with complex structures such as maps,
lists, and sets, it's sometimes necessary to test the count attribute for the
structure, versus a key within it, depending on whether or not the diff has
marked the whole structure as computed. This is demonstrated in the example
below. Count keys are %
for maps, and #
for lists and sets. If you are
having trouble determining the type of specific field within a resource, contact
the support team.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
resource "null_resource" "bar" {
triggers = {
foo_id = "${null_resource.foo.id}"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
, if the id
of
null_resource.foo
was currently not known, such as when the resource is
pending creation, or is being deleted and re-created:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.bar[0].diff["triggers.%"].computed }
Value: new
- Value Type: String.
The new
value within the diff namespace contains
the new value of a changing attribute, if the value is known at plan time.
new
will be an empty string if the attribute's value is currently unknown.
For more details on detecting unknown values, see computed
.
Note that this value is always a string, regardless of the actual type of the value changing. Type conversion within policy may be necessary to achieve the comparison needed.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
, if the resource was in the diff
and each of the concerned keys were changing to new values:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.foo[0].diff["triggers.foo"].new is "bar" }
Value: old
- Value Type: String.
The old
value within the diff namespace contains
the old value of a changing attribute.
Note that this value is always a string, regardless of the actual type of the value changing. Type conversion within policy may be necessary to achieve the comparison needed.
If the value did not exist in the previous state, old
will always be an empty
string.
As an example, given the following resource:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "baz"
}
}
If that resource was previously in config as:
resource "null_resource" "foo" {
triggers = {
foo = "bar"
}
}
The following policy would evaluate to true
:
import "tfplan"
main = rule { tfplan.resources.null_resource.foo[0].diff["triggers.foo"].old is "bar" }