deleting resources via Atlantis

[justinhauer]

How are people using Atlantis to remove resources? say I deploy resources via Atlantis into my cloud provider, and I now want to manage the full life cycle of that resource. Do I run an Atlantis destroy (Terraform destroy) through a PR to specify that specific item as well? I need to have a better understanding of how people are handling that.

[justinhauer]

I realized that I can do this via atlantis plan -- -destroy from finding a closed issue. Can this be please be added to the documentation (If it is, more clearly?)?

[justinhauer]

Also, is there a way for atlantis to destroy a specific resource within a .tf file? Like:

terraform destroy -target RESOURCE_TYPE.NAME -target RESOURCE_TYPE2.NAME

[lkysow]

If the resource is in Terraform, then delete it from your config file and push a PR and the plan will contain the deletion of that resource.

atlantis plan -- -destroy is used if you want to delete all the resources in a certain config.

There is no way to run the destroy command you show above (that I know of) other than to delete it from your code.

[justinhauer]

Thanks for your reply on this. Realizing that this was an issue with me not configuring a remote state file previously

[lkysow]

Ahh, yeah sorry about that. I need to implement #435

[lkysow]

I'll close this then unless you have more questions.

[justinhauer]

just add documentation please that people need to configure a remote state

[lkysow]

This is already documented: https://www.runatlantis.io/docs/requirements.html#terraform-state

But a warning in the actual comments would be more effective.

[kzap]

Sorry old comment but what about commenting out your TF resources and submitting that as a PR, or renaming the .tf files as something else if you separate your resources from the provider and state config?

[jamengual]

that is the same thing as deleting the resource from the file and pushing forward.

I personally prefer :

resource "aws_sns_topic" "default" {
  count             = var.enabled ? 1 : 0
  name              = join(module.this.delimiter, [local.alert_for, "threshold", "alerts"])
  tags              = module.this.tags
  kms_master_key_id = var.kms_master_key_id
}

some people argue that count is overused and I think it is an absolutely baseless argument since is like saying using while loops are a hack, the reason people say that is because in the TF 0.11 days it was the only way to do loops and conditions and some of them were long and ugly but now you have for, for_each and count.

[rjayaprakash-exelixis]

can we run the target flag in Atlantis to destroy specific resources?

atlantis plan -- -destroy -target RESOURCE_TYPE.NAME -target RESOURCE_TYPE2.NAME

[nitrocode]

Yes that's possible. Please see #3288.