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Improve Terraform Diff View

Feature RequestsStacksUI/UX

Could you make it easier to understand the plan and apply diff for terraform? One way to do it is something like https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-runtask-tf-plan-analyzer where you push it through an LLM, but also some UI improvements to make it more like terraform cloud's plan diff would work as well.

Example use cases:

  • See the plan diff while an Apply is running

  • Show just the individual fields that are changing

  • make it easier to grok what is happening when there are lots of changes

  • handle complex resource diffs

Without this, our engineers find your current plan diff completely unusable, and so they are just blindly applying.

Workaround
No
Status: ✅ Completed6 comments

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Comments6

  • Jonah Kowall

    Team•

    Jun 11

    We have delivered a lot of enhancements on this front since this was opened in 2023, however the feature request is very broad, so if there are specific features that you want improvements on please vote for the other feature requests on the diff view. Feel free to reach out if you have additional comments or feedback. Thanks.

  • Beige Kangaroo

    •

    Jul 16, 2025

    I frequently make terraform PRs to add a single snowflake schema. The diff is 137 changed resources, each requiring me to click a dropdown to view the detail of. Most of which are not actually changing, just swapping their order in an array that should’ve been unordered to begin with. Other diffs are just terraform implementation details that aren’t relevant “null → 77dsd81a”, it’s just terraform informing you that it can’t detect the current value, or needs to make some change that doesn’t involve actually calling any APIs, just updating the state file.

  • Black Breeze

    •

    May 10, 2025

    Thanks for the feedback! We’d love to understand a bit more:

    • What are you trying to accomplish when reading a Terraform diff in Spacelift?

    • Is it about understanding risk, communicating changes, debugging something, or something else?

    • What’s hard or frustrating today? (Too much noise? Not enough context? Can’t tell why something changed?)

    • And finally, if we pushed it through an LLM — what would you want back?

    We already show a structured change view today (including planned values and diffs - see below), so we’re curious: what’s missing or broken for your use case?

    The more we understand the job you’re hiring Spacelift for here, the better we can help.

    • Plum Pen

      •

      May 12, 2025

      Your structured view can be quite limiting .. especially when it comes to deeper values .. eg .. an IAM policy change .. in general you fall short on any kind of these YAML/JSON fields .. since it shows as “giant blob is changing” .. rather than a line by line diff of the json ..

      I’m not 100% clear anymore on what I meant overall, but json/yaml fields are definitely an issue :)

    • Aqua Reindeer

      •

      May 12, 2025

      1. I am trying to see what is going to change when this apply runs, or what is changing while an apply is running, or what changed after the apply

      2. Your logs cut off, so often it’s impossible to see what would change in a plan.

      3. Many things are frustrating about your current diff. I outlined most of them above. Most of my problems are ui problems, just understanding what you’re showing and what changed is very difficult. Adding the field changes is great, but you still regularly display diffs that are useless (attached is a screenshot example of one we see regularly).

      4. I don’t need a plain text representation of the diff, I need a well designed view of the data you already have.

  • Tomato Melon

    •

    Mar 26, 2025

    My teams are pushing back on spacelift verse other solutions due to incomplete detail conveyed in GitHub Action plan results. They are refusing to approve without being able to see plan details like in local preview.