Using workspaces to manage environments

Note

The code for this section is under the chap05/workspaces directory in the GitHub repo of this book.

Workspaces allow us to have multiple independent state files for a single configuration. Thus, we can have one state file for our development project and a second one for production. By itself, that might appear to be very limited. However, combined with the effective use of variable definitions files (.tfvars) and Google projects, this can be an effective method to manage multiple environments.

Let’s see how we can accomplish this. Using the sample code at chap05/workspaces, run terraform init and terraform apply like normal. Then, have a look at the state file using terraform state list:

$ terraform init
$ terraform apply
$ terraform state list

We can see the three servers and their static IP addresses in the state file.

Next, create a new workspace named prod using the terraform workspace new prod command. The terraform...