Terraform: Provide -json to show command

[sethvargo]

In talking with Paul, it would be great if Terraform supported a -format=json flag to terraform show. Right now, it's easy to cat terraform.tfstate (for local state), but it would be nice to have a jq-able API for querying information.

Terraform Version

0.7.1 (3af6796)

Affected Resource(s)

• core

[devth]

Any plans to impl this?

[apparentlymart]

Since Terraform 0.9 there has been a command to retrieve the state and print it to stdout:

$ terraform state pull

This then gives the same result as accessing the terraform.tfstate file but works for all state storage backends.

I think that takes care of the use-case that originally motivated this request, so I'm going to close this. (@devth, thanks for bumping this so that I could notice that it's actually been addressed!)

[devth]

I don't see an option to format it as json though. Wasn't the point to be able to slice up state with jq?

[apparentlymart]

The output of that command is the raw state data, which is itself JSON-serialized.

I should note that the exact structure of state is _not_ currently considered a compatibility constraint, so anyone parsing it should be prepared for it to change in future, though in practice so far it has changed pretty infrequently and only in minor ways.

[cornfeedhobo]

I don't think this should have been closed. Asking someone to parse terraform.tfstate is a drastically different task than adding -json to state show and parsing that.
Thoughts?

[Nowaker]

+1 for @cornfeedhobo. Getting state show -json would be really appreciated.

[ThisGuyCodes]

alsoalso for outputing terraform plan information

[mstancombe]

terraform state pull will dump the entire state, correct? including any sensitive info, which terraform currently stores.

I think there is definitely a need to selectively get specific resources that don't involve handling all the state, and adding a 'json' flag to 'show' would certainly cover that need.

[hashibot[bot]]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for _30 days_ ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

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