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Option to skip planning and go straight to apply for terragrunt

Feature RequestsTerragrunt

In Non Production stacks, it would be nice to skip running plan on a tracked run and go straight to apply. I believe for Ansible this is accomplished through SPACELIFT_SKIP_PLANNING.

I believe this should be an option because the plan is being reviewed from a pull request before being merged. There are a couple of risks of just applying straight to main but the speed increase we receive from skipping a plan is a trade off we would be happy with for non production use cases.

Workaround
No
Status: ❌ Rejected1 comment

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Comments1

  • Jonah Kowall

    Team•

    Jul 13

    Thanks for raising this, and apologies for the slow follow-up.

    If the goal is to skip the manual confirmation between plan and apply, Autodeploy already does that: on a push to the tracked branch the run applies automatically, no click needed.

    If the goal is to skip the plan entirely for speed, that doesn’t hold up for Terragrunt specifically. Unlike Ansible (where the plan is an optional check-mode step, hence SPACELIFT_SKIP_PLANNING), Terragrunt and OpenTofu compute a plan as part of apply, and Spacelift intentionally re-plans at apply for Terragrunt because a saved plan can carry mocked dependency outputs that must not be applied (see https://docs.spacelift.io/vendors/terragrunt/limitations). So skipping the plan phase wouldn’t save the planning work, but it would remove your plan policies, the change preview, and the approval gate.

    Because it drops real safety controls for little practical speedup, we’re going to decline a blanket skip-planning option for Terragrunt. We’d rather keep the plan phase as the place where policy checks and change review happen.

    If the real pain is run latency, that’s something we do want to solve, just not by removing the plan. If you can share where the slowness actually sits (queue time, plan duration, provider downloads), that’s the more useful thread to pull. Thanks again for the suggestion.