Terraform workspaces are similar to the concept of namespaces, which enables us to manage multiple deployments of the same configuration (like using the same configs but for development environment, production environment, testing environment, etc..)

Note: its not meant to be used for creating different components in separate workspaces as it would case conflict to the state file

Notes

• By default, there is a default workspace
• Each workspace has its own state file
• Terraform provides an interpolation sequence to reference the value of the currently selected workspace using terraform.workspace

Example

Say you want to create an EC2 instance, but with varying sizes depending on the environment. First, define in the variables file (like in the second code block) a flag which can be used as an indicator whether it’ll be created for development or production. Here the lookup function was used to retrieve the value from the created variable map using the current active workspace

resource "aws_instance" "webserver" {
  ami = var.ami
  instance_type = lookup(var.instance_type, terraform.workspace)
  tags = {
    Environment = terraform.workspace
  }
}

variable "ami" {
  default = "ami-24e140119877avm"
}

variable "region" {
  default = "ca-central-1"
}

variable "instance_type" {
  default = "t2.micro"
}

variable "instance_type" {
  type = map
  default = {
    "development" = "t2.micro"
    "production" = "m5.large"
  }
}

There can be other ways to implement a resource using the terraform.workspace check the following for more examples

Commands

terraform workspace new

terraform workspace list # also shows which workspace you are currently in

terraform workspace show

terraform workspace select

terraform workspace delete