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Data sources

It is common to want your Terraform configuration to refer to information beyond the current Terraform definition, either because it is defined in a separate Terraform project, or because the item is not under the control of Terraform. This is supported in Terraform by a concept called data sources. Providers offer data sources alongside their data types, and in the Aiven Terraform provider, you will find that there are many situations where the same item appears as both a managed resource and a read-only data source.

A good example is the project resource. If you are working with services and other resources inside a project, then you might want to access information about it, without managing (or destroying during testing) the project itself. Instead of using the aiven_project resource, try the aiven_project data source instead. Here's an example:

data "aiven_project" "sandbox" {
project = "my-sandbox"
}

output "project_ca" {
value = data.aiven_project.sandbox.ca_cert
sensitive = true
}

By using the data source instead of the resource Terraform won't try to manage the project. However it has awareness of it and can return information relating to it. In the example above the certificate is made available as an output value so that Terraform can use that data perhaps as configuration for another resource.

The data source approach is recommended for projects that will integrate with resources that they don't manage themselves.