We’ve had feedback from our users where they regularly have to run terraform imports. It’s been asked that a GUI for terraform imports is provided, to simplify this action
Thanks for surfacing this—totally makes sense at a glance, and we’d love to unpack it further.
Can you walk us through a recent time you had to import a resource into Terraform/OpenTofu state?
What triggered the import?
What steps did you take?
What was frustrating or slow?
What would “ideal” look like?
We know declarative import blocks exist in both Terraform and OpenTofu—so we’re curious: is the ask really about a GUI, or about making one-off imports safer, faster, or more visible? If we build something, we want it to actually eliminate pain—not just add another button.
Happy to dig deeper if you’re up for it.
Rose Newt
•
May 12, 2025
Hey Marcin! Thanks for coming back to me.
So, essentially a lot of our users are new to terraform and IAC in general, including state management. They may have pre-existing resources that they want to pull in, but not necessarily want to pull a whole state file in. They may also experience a failed deploy run, where the resource has actually deployed but the agent timed out before the deployment completes (happens with some Azure SQLMI, Synapse etc, takes too long for the deployment so terraform thinks its failed).
In general, I think the view is that running 1 off terraform commands to import resources to state are scary, and a GUI could ease newer users into it.
In my head, this simply looked like a GUI of the state file, with import and remove functions which essentially run 1 off import / remove commands against specific resources stored in the state file.
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Black Breeze
May 7, 2025
Thanks for surfacing this—totally makes sense at a glance, and we’d love to unpack it further.
Can you walk us through a recent time you had to import a resource into Terraform/OpenTofu state?
What triggered the import?
What steps did you take?
What was frustrating or slow?
What would “ideal” look like?
We know declarative import blocks exist in both Terraform and OpenTofu—so we’re curious: is the ask really about a GUI, or about making one-off imports safer, faster, or more visible? If we build something, we want it to actually eliminate pain—not just add another button.
Happy to dig deeper if you’re up for it.
Rose Newt
May 12, 2025
Hey Marcin! Thanks for coming back to me.
So, essentially a lot of our users are new to terraform and IAC in general, including state management. They may have pre-existing resources that they want to pull in, but not necessarily want to pull a whole state file in. They may also experience a failed deploy run, where the resource has actually deployed but the agent timed out before the deployment completes (happens with some Azure SQLMI, Synapse etc, takes too long for the deployment so terraform thinks its failed).
In general, I think the view is that running 1 off terraform commands to import resources to state are scary, and a GUI could ease newer users into it.
In my head, this simply looked like a GUI of the state file, with import and remove functions which essentially run 1 off import / remove commands against specific resources stored in the state file.