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2014-07-23 14:42:49 -07:00

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Destroy Infrastructure

We've now seen how to build and change infrastructure. Before we move on to creating multiple resources and showing resource dependencies, we're going to go over how to completely destroy the Terraform-managed infrastructure.

Destroying your infrastructure is a rare event in production environments. But if you're using Terraform to spin up multiple environments such as development, test, QA environments, then destroying is a useful action.

Plan

While our infrastructure is simple, viewing the execution plan of a destroy can be useful to make sure that it is destroying only the resources you expect.

To ask Terraform to create an execution plan to destroy all infrastructure, run the plan command with the -destroy flag.

$ terraform plan -destroy
...

- aws_instance.example

The output says that "aws_instance.example" will be deleted.

The -destroy flag lets you destroy infrastructure without modifying the configuration. You can also destroy infrastructure by simply commenting out or deleting the contents of your configuration, but usually you just want to destroy an instance of your infrastructure rather than permanently deleting your configuration as well. The -destroy flag is for this case.

Apply

Let's apply the destroy:

$ terraform apply -destroy
aws_instance.example: Destroying...

Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 1 destroyed.

...

Done. Terraform destroyed our one instance, and if you run a terraform show, you'll see that the state file is now empty.

Next

You now know how to create, modify, and destroy infrastructure. With these building blocks, you can effectively experiment with any part of Terraform.

Next, we move on to features that make Terraform configurations slightly more useful: variables, resource dependencies, provisioning, and more.