» Destroy Infrastructure

We've now seen how to build and change infrastructure. Before we move on to creating multiple resources and showing resource dependencies, we're going to go over how to completely destroy the Terraform-managed infrastructure.

Destroying your infrastructure is a rare event in production environments. But if you're using Terraform to spin up multiple environments such as development, test, QA environments, then destroying is a useful action.

» Destroy

Resources can be destroyed using the terraform destroy command, which is similar to terraform apply but it behaves as if all of the resources have been removed from the configuration.

$ terraform destroy
# ...

  - aws_instance.example

The - prefix indicates that the instance will be destroyed. As with apply, Terraform shows its execution plan and waits for approval before making any changes.

Answer yes to execute this plan and destroy the infrastructure:

# ...
aws_instance.example: Destroying...

Destroy complete! Resources: 1 destroyed.

# ...

Just like with apply, Terraform determines the order in which things must be destroyed. In this case there was only one resource, so no ordering was necessary. In more complicated cases with multiple resources, Terraform will destroy them in a suitable order to respect dependencies, as we'll see later in this guide.

» Next

You now know how to create, modify, and destroy infrastructure from a local machine.

Next, we move on to features that make Terraform configurations slightly more useful: variables, resource dependencies, provisioning, and more.