S3 native state locking in Terraform

Since the

However, this didn't solve the issue entirely, because there was no build-in mechanism to check if an object exists, before creating it.

Fortunately, after another 4 years, , which doesn't require any additional resources, apart from the bucket itself.

After a couple of months, , at the time of writing this article, there was no equivalent solution developed. But I hope it will be created in the coming months.

So, while previously your S3 backend configuration looked like this:

terraform {

  backend "s3" {

    bucket         = "example-bucket"

    key            = "path/to/state"

    region         = "us-east-1"

    dynamodb_table = "example-table"

  }

}

Now it can look like this:

terraform {

  backend "s3" {

    bucket       = "example-bucket"

    key          = "path/to/state"

    region       = "us-east-1"

    use_lockfile = true

  }

}

Currently, while this feature is still experimental, use_lockfile argument is optional and defaults to false.

To support migration from older versions of Terraform which only support DynamoDB-based locking, it can be configured simultaneously with dynamodb_table argument. In a future minor version the DynamoDB locking mechanism will be removed.