New to Terraform, I'm trying to render a template but I don't want to initialize the state or anything. I want to be able to download the template file from source control and then plug in the variable values and get a rendered template. I have tried using terraform console but because the template depends on some values in a locals { ... } block it's saying that I need to run terraform apply to be able to render the template. Is there not a clever way I can still get the values from this locals { ... } block without having to run terraform apply ?

If I do have to run apply, is there a way to make sure everything happens locally and there is no back-end interactions (trying to prevent mishaps)?

CodePudding user response：

The way I ended up getting the job done was as follows:

• pull the locals block contents into a file in the current working directory
• copy any *.tfvars files to current working directory and rename *.auto.tfvars
• Create a data resource with the template and vars passed in:

data "template_file" "rendered_template" {
    template = "${file("/path/to/your.template")}"
    vars = {
        my_var = "hello"
    }
}

• Run terraform refresh in current working directory
• Run terraform state show data.template_file.rendered_template