Terraform Import - Is the Resource Label critical?

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Our terraform remote state file in Azure has been completely destroyed and we're now faced with the challenge of recreating the state file from scratch. My option is to use the Terraform import command, using the following simple syntax:

terraform import <Terraform Resource Name>.<Resource Label> <Azure Resource ID>

To import the existing resource group for example, I will create the following configuration in a main.tf file.

provider "azurerm" {
    version="1.39.0"
}

# create resource group
resource "azurerm_resource_group" "rg"{
    name = "rg-terraform"
    location = "uksouth"
}

Now, the problem I have is as follows:

When the existing Azure resources were originally created, they were assigned names that used an extremely complex naming convention, with some characters even being randomly generated. To further compound matters, they were all unique and there are hundreds of them. All would have been rosy if they were assigned a simplistic name like "main", as is used commonly in a lot of Terraform examples, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

My question therefore, is this:

  1. When putting together my main.tf configuration file to be used for the Import, is it an absolute requirement that my "Resource Label" (given in my Import command) has to match the original "Resource Label" name from when the resource was created?

  2. If it is a mandatory requirement, is there any way I could retrieve the original "Resource Label" from Azure in the same way that I can for instance obtain the "Azure Resource ID" from the Azure Portal or even an Az CLI query?

  3. How can I ensure any child resources such as Subnets are included in the Import, without having to trawl manually through the Azure Portal to identify each one of them?

azureportal terraform azure
1 Answers
  1. No, absolutely not. Choose whatever you want.
  2. No, Azure generally does not know about this label, it is something terraform internal.
  3. Unfortunately you need to import each and every resource manually and separately.

Have you made absolutely sure the current state file is lost? The storage location was not versioned? Does no developer still have a local copy of the state file laying around?

user_24428040
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