Introduction
The .terraformignorefile serves the purpose of ignoring parts of the configuration that a user uploads to Terraform Cloud in order to save time on CLI-driven runs. More information on the use case can be found in this article.
Use Case
In certain situations, the .terraformingore file may appear as it is not performing as expected. That could be due to a wrong configuration.
Solution
Using theTF_IGNORE=trace environment variable while performing your Terraform runs will show an output of which files inside the configuration will not be uploaded to Terraform Cloud.
As a demonstration consider the following configuration tree structure:
├── .DS_Store
├── .terraformignore
├── directory1
│ ├── .DS_Store
│ └── subdirectory1
│ ├── .DS_Store
│ ├── .terraform
│ │ ├── environment
│ │ ├── providers
│ │ │ └── registry.terraform.io
│ │ │ └── hashicorp
│ │ │ └── null
│ │ │ └── 3.1.0
│ │ │ └── darwin_amd64
│ │ │ └── terraform-provider-null_v3.1.0_x5
│ │ └── terraform.tfstate
│ ├── .terraform.lock.hcl
│ ├── largefolder
│ │ └── largefile70mb
│ └── main.tf
├── directory2
│ └── main.tf
├── directory3
│ └── main.tf
├── directory4
│ └── main.tf
└── largefile70mb
.terraformignore contents:
/**
!directory1/
directory1/subdirectory1/largefolder/**
The .terraformignore file in the above example should ignore all folders and files except contents of directory1 but ignore everything inside the directory1/subdirectory1/largefolder/ path.
We are using a working directory in the Terraform Cloud Workspace -directory1/subdirectory1.
$ export TF_IGNORE=trace
$ cd directory1/subdirectory1
$ terraform plan
Running plan in the remote backend. Output will stream here. Pressing Ctrl-C
will stop streaming the logs, but will not stop the plan running remotely.
Preparing the remote plan...
The remote workspace is configured to work with configuration at
directory1/subdirectory1 relative to the target repository.
Terraform will upload the contents of the following directory,
excluding files or directories as defined by a .terraformignore file
at /terraform/testing_terraform_ignore/.terraformignore (if it is present),
in order to capture the filesystem context the remote workspace expects:
/terraform/testing_terraform_ignore
Skipping excluded path: .DS_Store
Skipping excluded path: .terraformignore
Skipping excluded path: directory1
Skipping excluded path: directory1/subdirectory1/largefolder/
Skipping excluded path: directory1/subdirectory1/largefolder/largefile70mb
Skipping excluded path: directory2
Skipping excluded path: directory2/main.tf
Skipping excluded path: directory3
Skipping excluded path: directory3/main.tf
Skipping excluded path: directory4
Skipping excluded path: directory4/main.tf
Skipping excluded path: largefile70mb
Waiting for the plan to start...Note:
TF_IGNORE will show every single file that will be skipped from upload in the output. If a directory path is shown as skipped that is not a sign of its contents being skipped as well.