Timeouts

The reality of cloud infrastructure is that it typically takes time to perform operations such as booting operating systems, discovering services, and replicating state across network edges. As the provider developer you should take known delays in resource APIs into account in the CRUD functions of the resource. Terraform supports configurable timeouts to assist in these situations.

The Framework can be used in conjunction with the terraform-plugin-framework-timeouts module in order to allow defining timeouts in configuration and have them be available in CRUD functions.

Specifying Timeouts in Configuration

Timeouts can be defined using either nested blocks or nested attributes.

If you are writing a new provider using terraform-plugin-framework then we recommend using nested attributes.

If you are migrating a provider from SDKv2 to the Framework and you are already using timeouts you can either continue to use block syntax, or switch to using nested attributes. However, switching to using nested attributes will require that practitioners that are using your provider update their Terraform configuration.

Block

If your configuration is using a nested block to define timeouts, such as the following:

resource "timeouts_example" "example" {
  /* ... */

  timeouts {
    create = "60m"
  }
}

Import the timeouts module.

import (
    /* ... */
    "github.com/hashicorp/terraform-plugin-framework-timeouts/resource/timeouts"
)

You can use this module to mutate the schema.Schema as follows:

func (t *exampleResource) Schema(ctx context.Context, req resource.SchemaRequest, resp *resource.SchemaResponse) {
    resp.Schema = schema.Schema{
        /* ... */

        Blocks: map[string]schema.Block{
            "timeouts": timeouts.Block(ctx, timeouts.Opts{
                Create: true,
            }),
        },

Attribute

If your configuration is using nested attributes to define timeouts, such as the following:

resource "timeouts_example" "example" {
  /* ... */

  timeouts = {
    create = "60m"
  }
}

You can use this module to mutate the schema.Schema as follows:

func (t *exampleResource) Schema(ctx context.Context, req resource.SchemaRequest, resp *resource.SchemaResponse) {
    resp.Schema = schema.Schema{
        Attributes: map[string]schema.Attribute{
            /* ... */
            "timeouts": timeouts.Attributes(ctx, timeouts.Opts{
                Create: true,
            }),
        },

Updating Models

In functions in which the config, state or plan is being unmarshalled, for instance, the Create function, the model will need to be updated.

func (e *exampleResource) Create(ctx context.Context, req resource.CreateRequest, resp *resource.CreateResponse) {
    var data exampleResourceData

    diags := req.Plan.Get(ctx, &data)
    resp.Diagnostics.Append(diags...)

Modify the exampleResourceData model to include a field for timeouts using a timeouts.Value type.

type exampleResourceData struct {
    /* ... */
    Timeouts    timeouts.Value `tfsdk:"timeouts"`

Accessing Timeouts in CRUD Functions

Once the model has been populated with the config, state or plan the duration of the timeout can be accessed by calling the appropriate helper function (e.g., timeouts.Create) and then used to configure timeout behaviour, for instance:

func (e *exampleResource) Create(ctx context.Context, req resource.CreateRequest, resp *resource.CreateResponse) {
    var data exampleResourceData

    diags := req.Plan.Get(ctx, &data)
    resp.Diagnostics.Append(diags...)
    if resp.Diagnostics.HasError() {
        return
    }

    createTimeout, diags := data.Timeouts.Create(ctx, 20*time.Minute)

    resp.Diagnostics.Append(diags...)

    if resp.Diagnostics.HasError() {
        return
    }

    ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(ctx, createTimeout)
    defer cancel()

    /* ... */
}