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How to Import an Existing Azure Resource in Terraform

Guillermo Musumeci
3 min readFeb 19, 2020

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In this story, we will learn how to import an existing Azure Resource in Terraform.

This allows us to use resources that we have created by some other means and bring it under Terraform management.

Update February 27, 2020: This procedure is valid for both AzureRM v1.x and AzureRM v2.x.

How to Import an Existing Azure Resource in Terraform

Terraform import can only import resources into the state. It does not generate configuration.

Importing an Existing Azure Resouce Group

We have an existing Azure Resource Group called late-motiv-rg, in the Azure Portal, we click on the properties and copy the Resource ID.

Or from the Azure Cloud Shell, we run the following command:

az group show --name late-motiv-rg --query id --output tsv

The result is the ID of the subscription:

az group show --name late-motiv-rg --query id --output tsv

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Guillermo Musumeci

Certified AWS, Azure & GCP Architect | HashiCorp Ambassador | Terraform SME | KopiCloud Founder | ex-AWS | Entrepreneur | Book Author | Husband & Dad of ✌