How to avoid creating existing resources in Terraform?

Question

I successfully applied my basic configuration for AWS using Terraform (added a DynamoDB table):

terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve

After I updated files by adding new resources and ran apply again, I got an error that Dynamo table already exists:

* aws_dynamodb_table.my-table: error creating DynamoDB Table: ResourceInUseException: Table already exists: my-table

How can I avoid replacing existing resources?

Answer 1

It turns out, that I needed to update to a newer version of Terraform . In my case, from 0.11.4 to 0.12.9

Before the change: state was updated, but not "used", so it tried to re-create ALL the resources.

After the change: apply phase skips the resources saved into state, as expected.

Hope it helps someone.