Removing Items from Terraform State

The rm subcommand

The terraform state rm command is used to remove items from the Terraform state.

Syntax

The rm subcommand has the following syntax: terraform state rm [options] ADDRESS.

Use of the terraform state rm command

We can use this command to remove a single resource, a single instance of a resource, entire modules, and more. The resources removed by the command are removed from the state file but aren’t destroyed in the target environment.

The most common use for the rm command is to remove a resource from Terraform management. The resource may be added to another configuration and imported, or perhaps Terraform is being replaced by something else. In either case, the goal is to remove the reference to the resource without deleting the actual resource.

How to apply the terraform state rm command

Let’s say that we’re no longer going to manage our aws_s3_bucket with Terraform. First, we can run the terraform state rm command:

$> terraform state rm aws_s3_bucket.terraform_test_bucket_edu
Removed aws_s3_bucket.terraform_test_bucket_edu
Successfully removed 1 resource instance(s).

Next, we execute the following command to show the Terraform state list. This command lists all resources in the state file so we can choose which resource item we want to delete.