Terraform Remote State & Locking — Challenge

The goal#

Achieve the same outcome as Terraform Remote State & Locking, from an empty starting point, without the steps.

State is on your laptop. A colleague runs terraform apply from theirs, sees none of your resources, and creates a second copy of everything — or worse, destroys yours.

This is the lab that makes Terraform usable by more than one person.

What must be true when you are done#

• State lives in S3, and terraform.tfstate is no longer written locally.
• The bucket has versioning and encryption enabled, and blocks public access.
• A second apply started while the first is running fails with a lock error rather than proceeding.
• You migrated existing state without any resource being destroyed and recreated.

Rules#

• Do not open the guided lab until you are finished, or until the same problem has held you up for 20 minutes.
• Documentation is allowed. In the job it is the first thing you open.
• Verify every criterion with a command whose output you can read.

If you get stuck#

1. What did you expect, exactly?
2. What happened instead — the error text, not a paraphrase?
3. Which layer is that error from?
4. What is the smallest command that proves the layer below is fine?