Exporting Google cloud configuration - google-cloud-platform

Question

Is there a way to export Google Cloud configuration for an object, such as for the load balancer, in the same way as one would use to set it up via the API?
I can quickly configure what I need in the console site, but I am spending tons of time trying to replicate that with Terraform. It would be great if I can generate Terraform files, or at least the Google API output, from the system I already have configured.

Answer 1

If you have something already created outside of Terraform and want to have Terraform manage it or want to work out how to best configure it with Terraform you could use Terraform's import command for any resource that supports it.
So if you have created a forwarding rule called terraform-test via the Google Cloud console and want to know how that maps to Terraform's google_compute_forwarding_rule resource then you could run terraform import google_compute_forwarding_rule.default terraform-test to import this into Terraform's state file.
If you then ran a plan, Terraform will tell you that it has the google_compute_forwarding_rule.default in its state but the resource is not defined in your code and as such it will want to remove it.
If you add the minimal config needed to make the plan work:
resource "google_compute_forwarding_rule" "default" {
name = "terraform-test"
}
And run the plan again Terraform will then tell you what things it needs to change to make your imported forwarding rule look like the config you have defined. Assuming you've done something like set the description on the load balancer Terraform's plan will show something like this:
An execution plan has been generated and is shown below.
Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
+ create
~ update in-place
-/+ destroy and then create replacement
Terraform will perform the following actions:
~ google_compute_forwarding_rule.default
description: "This is the description I added via the console" => ""
Plan: 5 to add, 5 to change, 3 to destroy.
This tells you that Terraform wants to remove the description on the forwarding rule to make it match the config.
If you then update your resource definition to something like:
resource "google_compute_forwarding_rule" "default" {
name = "terraform-test"
description = "This is the description I added via the console"
}
Terraform's plan will then show an empty change set:
No changes. Infrastructure is up-to-date.
This means that Terraform did not detect any differences between your
configuration and real physical resources that exist. As a result, no
actions need to be performed.
At this point you have now aligned your Terraform code with the reality of the resource in Google Cloud and should be able to easily see what needs to be set on the Terraform side to make things happen as expected in the Google Cloud console.