Question 104656 in Azure Question posted in
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Azure – How to recover Terraform state file

I am new to the Terraform world. I have started working on IaC for Azure using TF.

I have below three queries regarding using TF:

  1. In case the state file gets accidentally deleted, is there a way to recover/recreate the state file from the current state of the Azure resources?
  2. In the case of Azure, if one makes some direct changes to the Azure resources from the Azure portal, is there a way to retrofit those changes automatically into the Terraform .tf or state files?
  3. Is there a way to generate terraform files for any existing Azure resources created directly from the portal?
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Answers


  1. 0

    First of all rules: Is mandatory to have a regular backup of your state file! Try to configure your Terraform backend in a remote place, like Google Cloud Storage

    Answering your questions:

    1. The process of recovering a deleted state file is never easy. You should import all the resources with terraform import. Check this document.

    1. If someone changes a resource via the Azure portal and if you do a terraform plan in your environment, you should check that changes were done outside Terraform. Then you should update your code to match those changes, after applying your code.
      To clarify, if someone changes your instance_type = c4.xlarge and you have at your code instance_type = t3.micro, if you apply your code, that change will be reverted so if you want to stay with instances with c4.xlarge you should change your code.

    2. I don’t use any kind of that tools but I can imagine that they exists.

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  2. 0
    1. In case the state file gets accidentally deleted, is there a way to recover/recreate the state file from the current state of the Azure resources?

    You should configure Terraform to use a backend that saves every version of your state file, and makes it really difficult to delete the state file. If you are using Azure as the backend, then I believe that would mean enabling Blob versioning, and Soft delete for blobs.

    Disclaimer: I don’t use Azure, so there may be more to it than that. On AWS you would enable S3 bucket versioning and MFA delete, and the features I linked appear to be the Azure equivalent.

    1. In the case of Azure, if one makes some direct changes to the Azure resources from the Azure portal, is there a way to retrofit those
      changes automatically into the Terraform .tf or state files?

    You would need to run terraform plan and examine the output to see how the current Azure resources differ from the Terraform configuration, then update your Terraform configuration until terraform plan says there are no changes.

    1. Is there a way to generate terraform files for any existing Azure resources created directly from the portal?

    There are some tools, like terraformer that attempt to do this, but in my experience they are always missing support for tons of features and generally don’t work well at all.

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