terraform/website/source/docs/commands/taint.html.markdown

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
docs	Command: taint	docs-commands-taint	The `terraform taint` command manually marks a Terraform-managed resource as tainted, forcing it to be destroyed and recreated on the next apply.

Command: taint

The terraform taint command manually marks a Terraform-managed resource as tainted, forcing it to be destroyed and recreated on the next apply.

This command will not modify infrastructure, but does modify the state file in order to mark a resource as tainted. Once a resource is marked as tainted, the next plan will show that the resource will be destroyed and recreated and the next apply will implement this change.

Forcing the recreation of a resource is useful when you want a certain side effect of recreation that is not visible in the attributes of a resource. For example: re-running provisioners will cause the node to be different or rebooting the machine from a base image will cause new startup scripts to run.

Note that tainting a resource for recreation may affect resources that depend on the newly tainted resource. For example, a DNS resource that uses the IP address of a server may need to be modified to reflect the potentially new IP address of a tainted server. The plan command will show this if this is the case.

Usage

Usage: terraform taint [options] name

The name argument is the name of the resource to mark as tainted. The format of this argument is TYPE.NAME, such as aws_instance.foo.

The command-line flags are all optional. The list of available flags are:

• -backup=path - Path to the backup file. Defaults to -state-out with the ".backup" extension. Disabled by setting to "-".

• -module=path - The module path where the resource to taint exists. By default this is the root path. Other modules can be specified by a period-separated list. Example: "foo" would reference the module "foo" but "foo.bar" would reference the "bar" module in the "foo" module.

• -no-color - Disables output with coloring

• -state=path - Path to read and write the state file to. Defaults to "terraform.tfstate".

• -state-out=path - Path to write updated state file. By default, the -state path will be used.