I’ve recently been learning and blogging about Terraform (the latest of which you can find here).

In this post, I’m going to cover the conditional creation of a resource, using the count variable.

Disclaimer

As with most of the stuff that finds its way into my blog, this is from finer minds than my own. It’s also worth noting, as with all the stuff that finds its way here, the main audience is future me.

Count

All of the resources in Terraform have an inbuild property of count - what that means is that you can do something like this:

resource "azurerm\_resource\_group" "rg" {
  count = 2
  name     = "myTFResourceGroup${count.index}"
  location = "westus2"
}

This will create two resource groups, called myTFResourceGroup0 and myTFResourceGroup1. Admittedly, this has limited uses; however, it becomes much more useful when you use something like this:

resource "azurerm\_resource\_group" "rg" {
  count                      = var.myvar == "some\_setting" ? 1 : 0 

So now, using the variables associated with the configuration that you run, you can either create the resource, or not (a count of 0 meaning that it will not be created).

Error

So that’s all well and good, but let’s imagine that you’re using this resource; for example:

resource "azurerm\_app\_service\_plan" "app-service-plan" {
  name                = "pcm-app-service-plan"
  location            = azurerm\_resource\_group.rg.location
  resource\_group\_name = azurerm\_resource\_group.rg.name
  sku {
    tier = "Standard"
    size = "S1"
  }
}

(See this post for an explanation of this)

If you’re using the resource group, you’ll start to get an error:

Because azurerm_resource_group.rg has “count” set, its attributes must be accessed on specific instances.

What this is basically telling you is that, because you’ve specified a count, you now have to tell it which version of the resource you’re referring to. In our case, we know that if the resource group exists at all, there will only be one; so we can use this:

resource "azurerm\_app\_service\_plan" "app-service-plan" {
  name                = "pcm-app-service-plan"
  location            = azurerm\_resource\_group.rg[0].location
  resource\_group\_name = azurerm\_resource\_group.rg[0].name
  sku {
    tier = "Standard"
    size = "S1"
  }
}

However, there’s still a problem here. Let’s imagine that our myvar setting is not set to “some_setting” - well in that case, the resource group will not create; however, the app service plan will, because no such check exists. The upshot of this is that you’ll need to ensure that anything that uses a resource that has a count, must itself, have a count (and on the same logic).