Terraform state reflects the most up to date reference of the infrastructure.
Sometimes you may need to remove a resource from the Terraform state manually. This is helpful if a resource has been deleted or modified manually and the resource definition has been removed in your Terraform code. This way you can re-run your Terraform plan and apply without deleting the remote infra resource that you removed from the state.
Step 1 – Find the resource you want to delete
Running this command will place all resources managed by Terraform in a list form, all resources separated by line breaks.
terraform state list
Step 2 – Remove the resource in question
Once you know the resource you would like to remove from the state, pass it’s Terraform reference name to the rm command below:
terraform state rm <resource_name>
Example:
terraform state rm module.kms_key.aws_kms_key.default[0]