Import: tfstate
Warning: The tfstate
import is now deprecated and will be permanently removed in August 2025.
We recommend that you start using the updated tfstate/v2 import as soon as possible to avoid disruptions.
The tfstate/v2
import offers improved functionality and is designed to better support your policy enforcement needs.
The tfstate
import provides access to the Terraform state.
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.
The state is the data that Terraform has recorded about a workspace at a particular point in its lifecycle, usually after an apply. You can read more general information about how Terraform uses state here.
Note: Since HCP Terraform currently only supports policy checks at plan
time, the usefulness of this import is somewhat limited, as it will usually give
you the state prior to the plan the policy check is currently being run for.
Depending on your needs, you may find the
applied
collection in tfplan
more useful,
which will give you a predicted state by applying plan data to the data found
here. The one exception to this rule is data sources, which will always give
up to date data here, as long as the data source could be evaluated at plan
time.
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
, outputs
, path
,
and resources
) are shortcuts to a module namespace scoped
to the root module. For more details, see the section on root namespace
aliases.
Namespace: Root
The root-level namespace consists of the values and functions documented below.
In addition to this, the root-level data
, outputs
, path
, and resources
keys alias to their corresponding namespaces or values within the module
namespace.
Function: module()
- 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 state.
As an example, given the following module block:
If the module contained the following content:
The following policy would evaluate to true
if the resource was present in
the state:
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 state at plan-time.
Modules not present in the state will not be present here, even if they are present in the configuration or the diff.
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 it is present in state.
As an example, if the following module block was present within a Terraform configuration:
The value of module_paths
would be:
And the following policy would evaluate to true
:
Note the above example only applies if the module is present in the state.
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 using the tfplan
import. By changing tfplan
in this function to tfstate
, you could make a similar function find all
resources of a specific type in the current state.
Value: terraform_version
- Value Type: String.
The terraform_version
value within the root namespace
represents the version of Terraform in use when the state was saved. 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
state was made with a version of Terraform in the 0.11.x series, excluding any
pre-release versions (example: -beta1
or -rc1
):
NOTE: This value is also available via the tfplan
import, which will be more current when a policy check is run against a plan.
It's recommended you use the value in tfplan
until HCP Terraform
supports policy checks in other stages of the workspace lifecycle. See the
terraform_version
reference within the
tfplan
import for more details.
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.outputs
- Loads the output namespace, which supply the outputs present in this module's state. Note that with Terraform 0.12 or later, this value is only available for the root namespace.resources
- Loads the resource namespace, filtered against resources.
Root Namespace Aliases
The root-level data
, outputs
, 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:
The following policy would evaluate to true
, only if the module was present
in the state:
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 number.
Some examples of multi-level access are below:
- To fetch all
aws_instance.foo
resource instances within the root module, you can specifytfstate.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 specifytfstate.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
tfstate.resources
. This is indexed by type, as shown above withtfstate.resources.aws_instance
, with names being the next level down, and so on.
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: attr
- Value Type: A string-keyed map of values.
The attr
value within the resource
namespace is a direct mapping to the state
of the resource.
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:
The following policy would evaluate to true
if the resource was in the state:
Value: depends_on
- Value Type: A list of strings.
The depends_on
value within the resource
namespace contains the dependencies for the
resource.
This is a list of full resource addresses, relative to the module (example:
null_resource.foo
).
As an example, given the following resources:
The following policy would evaluate to true
if the resource was in the state:
Value: id
- Value Type: String.
The id
value within the resource
namespace contains the id of the resource.
NOTE: The example below uses a data source here because the
null_data_source
data source gives a static ID,
which makes documenting the example easier. As previously mentioned, data
sources share the same namespace as resources, but need to be loaded with the
data
key. For more information, see the
synopsis for the namespace itself.
As an example, given the following data source:
The following policy would evaluate to true
:
Value: tainted
- Value Type: Boolean.
The tainted
value within the resource
namespace is true
if the resource is
marked as tainted in Terraform state.
As an example, given the following resource:
The following policy would evaluate to true
, if the resource was marked as
tainted in the state:
Namespace: Outputs
The output namespace represents all of the outputs present within a module. Outputs are present in a state if they were saved during a previous apply, or if they were updated with known values during the pre-plan refresh.
With Terraform 0.11 or earlier this can be used to fetch both the outputs of the root module, and the outputs of any module in the state below the root. This makes it possible to see outputs that have not been threaded to the root module.
With Terraform 0.12 or later outputs are available in the top-level (root module) namespace only and not accessible within submodules.
This namespace is indexed by output name.
Value: sensitive
- Value Type: Boolean.
The sensitive
value within the output namespace is
true
when the output has been marked as sensitive.
As an example, given the following output:
The following policy would evaluate to true
:
Value: type
- Value Type: String.
The type
value within the output namespace gives the
output's type. This will be one of string
, list
, or map
. These are
currently the only types available for outputs in Terraform.
As an example, given the following output:
The following policy would evaluate to true
:
Value: value
- Value Type: String, list, or map.
The value
value within the output namespace is the value
of the output in question.
Note that the only valid primitive output type in Terraform is currently a string, which means that any int, float, or boolean value will need to be converted before it can be used in comparison. This does not apply to primitives within maps and lists, which will be their original types.
As an example, given the following output blocks:
The following policy would evaluate to true
: