How to Import an Google Cloud Bigtable App Profile into Terraform

Import Google Cloud Bigtable App Profile with Terraback (recommended)

Terraback reverse-engineers your live infrastructure: it reads the Google Cloud Bigtable resource with read-only credentials, generates the HCL, and produces the exact import block. Two commands take you from a live Google Cloud Bigtable App Profile to managed Terraform.

terraback scan all gcp --project my-gcp-project

terraback gcp import --method bulk

The Terraform import block

Terraback emits a Terraform 1.5+ import block like the one below. Because the block lives in your configuration, the import is reviewable in a pull request and repeatable across environments.

import {
  to = google_bigtable_app_profile.main
  id = "projects/my-project/instances/my-instance/appProfiles/my-profile"
}

Example google_bigtable_app_profile configuration

Here is a realistic Google Cloud Bigtable App Profile block. Terraback generates a fuller version from your actual resource attributes; this is a minimal, valid starting point.

resource "google_bigtable_app_profile" "main" {
  instance       = google_bigtable_instance.main.name
  app_profile_id = "my-profile"
  description    = "Single-cluster routing profile"

  single_cluster_routing {
    cluster_id                 = "my-cluster"
    allow_transactional_writes = true
  }

  ignore_warnings = true
}

Gotchas when importing a Google Cloud Bigtable App Profile

• Exactly one routing policy is required: either single_cluster_routing or multi_cluster_routing_use_any, never both.
• Switching between single-cluster and multi-cluster routing forces recreation, which ignore_warnings does not prevent.
• Deleting an app profile that clients still reference can break traffic; set ignore_warnings only when you accept that risk.
• The app profile is tied to a specific instance, so the instance must exist (or be imported) before the profile.

Doing it manually with terraform import

The native approach is to write the google_bigtable_app_profile block by hand, then run terraform import google_bigtable_app_profile.example <import-id> for every resource, one at a time. That works for a handful of resources, but it does not scale: you author all the HCL yourself and repeat the command for each item. Terraback generates the HCL and the import blocks for your whole account in one pass.

Import other Google Cloud resources