Terraform is a great tool and we use it extensively to spin up resources in AWS. It’s very easy to get started, the documentation is great and once you have built yourself a development environment it’s just a matter of changing a few config settings and you have yourself a staging and prod environment too.
It gets more tricky when the different environments are not exactly copies of each other. For example, in development you might want to create a SNS topic to use for testing whereas in staging and production you might want to use an external one.
Creating resources in some environments and not others can be controlled using the “count” parameter on a resource. So in the case of the SNS topic we only want to create in development, we can set an sns_count variable to be 1 in development and 0 elsewhere and use this to only create the topic in development.
But suppose we want to use the ARN of the created topic if it exists, or a fixed ARN of an external topic otherwise. Now it becomes even harder. Suppose that we are creating the SNS topic like this:
resource "aws_sns_topic" "sns_topic" {
name = "our_topic"
count = "${var.sns_count}"
}
and we have a variable topic_arn that will contain a fixed topic ARN to use if we have not created one. Terraform does not have any kind of conditional logic, but has a simple ternary function and there is a coalesce function which takes the first non-empty string from a list. So you might think that the following string interpolation would work:
"${coalesce(aws_sns_topic.sns_topic.arn, var.topic_arn)}"
Unfortunately it doesn’t because in the case where we do not create the topic, Terraform complains that there is no arn attribute.
So, to get around this we use this syntax instead:
"${coalesce(join("", aws_sns_topic.sns_topic.*.arn), var.topic_arn)}"
The .*.arn syntax returns a list of the ARNs for all the created topics, which will be either one or none. So we flatten this to a string with the join function and finally, it works as we want. Phew!