Importing resources

Sometimes, the resource was created manually. For example, you might have had an existing AWS infrastructure in place before you decided to introduce Terraform to your company. Now you need to move it somehow under Terraform's control. One option is, of course, to just recreate everything. Not all the resources are that easy to recreate though. That's where the terraform import command will help us.

If you destroyed it before, then rerun the template to create a new VPC. Then, create a new NAT gateway manually from AWS Management Console:

To import it, we need to know the ID of this gateway:

Copy it and go back to console. To add this gateway to the state file, you need to execute the following command:

$> terraform import aws_nat_gateway.imported_gateway nat-034caa3c2000cd7fb      
provider.aws.region
aws_nat_gateway.imported_gateway: Importing from ID "nat-034caa3c2000cd7fb"...
aws_nat_gateway.imported_gateway: Import complete!
  Imported aws_nat_gateway (ID: nat-034caa3c2000cd7fb...