Lesson 3 of 5 · Terraform State & Drift Detection

Refresh-only plans and normal plans

A normal plan refreshes Terraform’s view of managed resources in most workflows, then compares that information with desired configuration. It may propose changes to bring cloud infrastructure back to configuration. A refresh-only plan is useful when you want to inspect and record the provider’s current values without proposing configuration-driven resource changes.

Example

# Inspect the provider view without proposing configuration changes
terraform plan -refresh-only

# Compare desired configuration with the refreshed view
terraform plan

Step by step

  1. Start with the correct account, region, workspace, and backend.
  2. Use refresh-only when investigating current provider values.
  3. Read every proposed action in a normal plan.
  4. Stop when the result does not match an approved decision.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Treating refresh-only as harmless without reviewing it.
  • Running a normal apply to discover what drift means.
  • Reviewing a plan without confirming the target environment.