How can I destroy a specific Terraform managed resource?

alan 0
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I have a DMS task that failed and isn't resuming or restarting. Unfortunately, according to AWS Support, the only recourse is to destroy and recreate it. I have a large infrastructure that takes several hours to destroy and recreate with Terraform. I'm running Terraform version 1.2.X with the AWS provider version 4.17.0.

I tried running terraform plan -destroy -target="<insert resource_type>.<insert resource_name>". I tried with and without quotes, double hyphens prior to the target option, module names, etc. Every time the result comes back with this error:

Either you have not created any objects yet or the existing objects were...

My hierarchy is this: Main module -> sub module -> resource. My spelling and punctuation are correct.

I've Google it. I find only the Hashicorp documentation that specifies the syntax but not the naming convention, as well as bug reports from years ago. How do I selectively destroy a resource?

terraform-provider-aws aws-dms terraform amazon-web-services
1 Answers

It turns out I wasn't naming my resource correctly.

After some trial and error, I ran a destroy plan for my entire infrastructure (terraform plan <insert module runtime params> -destroy). Using the output from that, I found the name of the resource I wanted to destroy. The format was module.<submodule>.<resourcetype>.<resourcename>.

Once I acquired the resource name directly from Terraform, I first ran the terraform plan -destroy -target="module.<submodule>.<resourcetype>.<resourcename>" command to verify the outcome, then the terraform destroy -target="module.<submodule>.<resourcetype>.<resourcename>" command and it worked!

alan0
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