Import Existing Infrastructure into Terraform State Management

Organizations rarely start with a clean slate. Most cloud environments contain resources created manually through the portal, CLI scripts, or ARM templates long before an infrastructure-as-code strategy is adopted. Terraform's import capability bridges this gap by allowing engineers to bring existing resources under declarative state management without destroying and recreating them. Since Terraform 1.5, the declarative import block and terraform plan -generate-config-out workflow have made this process repeatable, auditable, and far less error-prone than the legacy imperative terraform import command.

In this lab, you will work with a set of pre-provisioned Azure resources (a virtual network, network security group, and storage account) that were created outside of Terraform. You will use the legacy terraform import command to understand the imperative approach, then progress to the modern declarative import block syntax with automatic configuration generation. By the end, all resources will be fully managed by Terraform with a clean terraform plan showing no changes.

Objectives

By completing this intermediate lab, you will be able to:

• Use the legacy terraform import command to import an Azure resource into Terraform state
• Write HCL configuration that matches the imported resource's actual state
• Use declarative import blocks (Terraform 1.5+) to import multiple Azure resources
• Generate Terraform configuration automatically with terraform plan -generate-config-out
• Verify successful imports by running terraform plan and confirming zero changes
• Identify Azure resource IDs using the Azure CLI for use in import operations

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Cloud engineers adopting Terraform in environments with existing Azure infrastructure
• DevOps practitioners who need to bring manually created resources under IaC management
• Terraform Associate candidates preparing for exam objectives on importing existing infrastructure