The show command should warn, not fail, if the plan is stale.

[nl-brett-stime]

Sometimes it's useful to see what the changes related to a give plan were even after it's been applied. When using the show command on a stale plan, ideally Terraform would report a warning and continue to show the plan instead of reporting an error and terminating. Alternately, maybe add an option to ignore staleness. E.g., terraform show -ignore-stale -json some.tfplan

Terraform Version

Tested in v1.0.11 but probably applies to more recent versions as well.

Terraform Configuration Files

Any config

Debug Output

Expected Behavior

<shows plan or plan JSON>
<outputs *warning* in yellow, maybe to stderr, that plan is stale>

Actual Behavior

(red error message): Saved plan is stale
<program terminates>

Steps to Reproduce

1. terraform init
2. terraform plan -out some.tfplan
3. terraform apply some.tfplan
4. terraform show -json some.tfplan

Additional Context

References

[alisdair]

Hi @nl-brett-stime, thanks for submitting this. There's some related work happening in #30205, fixing #30195, and I believe that what you're describing here may already be fixed in the 1.1 series. Could you check if 1.1.2 resolves the issue for you?

[dominics]

Shouldn't that be 1.1.3 to check? (if we're checking for #30205 - the changelog indicates that's when it was released) - and thanks for your work @alisdair!

#28136 seems like another duplicate that might be fixed, which is excellent (and my CI/CD scripts have been experiencing this stale plan warning for a few years - there's no good way to get at the JSON for an applied plan otherwise - so I'm really happy about this potential fix)

[alisdair]

Ah, yes, thanks for the correction!

I've just verified that this is fixed in Terraform 1.1.3, so I'm closing this and the other issue accordingly.

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