How to create azurerm_resourcegroup through terraform only when it does not exist in Azure?

Question

I want my terraform script to create the resource group only when it does not exist in Azure, otherwise it should skip the creation of resource group.

Answer 1

Well, you can use Terraform external to execute the CLI command to check if the resource group exists or not. And then use the result to determine whether the resource group will create. Here is an example:

./main.tf

provider "azurerm" {
    features {}
}

variable "group_name" {}

variable "location" {
    default = "East Asia"
}

data "external" "example" {
    program = ["/bin/bash","./script.sh"]

    query = {
        group_name = var.group_name
    }
}

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "example" {
    count = data.external.example.result.exists == "true" ? 0 : 1
    name = var.group_name
    location = var.location
}

./script.sh

#!/bin/bash 

eval "$(jq -r '@sh "GROUP_NAME=\(.group_name)"')"
result=$(az group exists -n $GROUP_NAME)

jq -n --arg exists "$result" '{"exists":$exists}'