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Over time the discussion about "lifecycle" blocks in the documentation became confusing because the docs originally written for managed resource lifecycle got partially generalized for resources of other modes and for module calls, even though each of those has a completely different lifecycle and thus a different set of lifecycle settings. This is a first pass at trying to reorganize that so that the "lifecycle" page is really just an index of all of the different kinds of lifecycle block that exist in the language, while the main documentation for each use of that block type now belongs with the documentation of the block it's nested within. While working on this I also found that there was some duplication inside the "data sources" page where the same information was described multiple times, and a few other cases where things had become inconsistent over time. This also includes a little extra content to try to clarify the difference between managed, data, and ephemeral resources and to make it explicit that the "Resources" section is focused only on managed resources because that is the primary resource mode. As usual there's lots more that could be done here -- this documentation has gradually evolved over time and is full of weird quirks due to that evolution -- but I decided to draw a line here so that the diff wouldn't get too large. Signed-off-by: Martin Atkins <mart@degeneration.co.uk>
42 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
42 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
---
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sidebar_label: timestamp
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description: |-
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The timestamp function returns a string representation of the current date
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and time.
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---
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# `timestamp` Function
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`timestamp` returns a UTC timestamp string in [RFC 3339](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339) format.
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In the OpenTofu language, timestamps are conventionally represented as
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strings using [RFC 3339](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339)
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"Date and Time format" syntax, and so `timestamp` returns a string
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in this format.
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The result of this function will change every second, so using this function
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directly with resource attributes will cause a diff to be detected on every
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OpenTofu run. We do not recommend using this function in resource attributes,
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but in rare cases it can be used in conjunction with
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[the `ignore_changes` lifecycle meta-argument](../../language/resources/behavior.mdx#ignore_changes)
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to take the timestamp only on initial creation of the resource. For more stable
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time handling, see the [Time Provider](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/time).
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Due to the constantly changing return value, the result of this function cannot
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be predicted during OpenTofu's planning phase, and so the timestamp will be
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taken only once the plan is being applied.
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## Examples
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```
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> timestamp()
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2018-05-13T07:44:12Z
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```
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## Related Functions
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* [`formatdate`](../../language/functions/formatdate.mdx) can convert the resulting timestamp to
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other date and time formats.
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* [`plantimestamp`](../../language/functions/plantimestamp.mdx) will return a consistent timestamp
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representing the date and time during the plan.
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