Removing Terraform Orphan Resource Bug

2/18/2020

Hey cloud workers!

I've been doing a lot of work with Terraform and AWS lately, and it's been a pretty positive experience.

As the project, I'm working on is fairly new, the standard for naming resources are only now being formed. Sometimes when I change the name of the resource and run terraform apply I get an error like this:

Error: orphan resource aws_acm_certificate.this still has a non-empty state after apply; this is a bug in Terraform

The changes I made were applied successfully but the error message and exit code were bothering me. In a script, what's a success would look like a failure!

The quickest fix for me was to remove the orphan resource from Terraform's state:

terraform state rm aws_acm_certificate.this

Of course, only do this if you know for certain that the resource is legitimately not meant to be in the state.

Happy deploying!