One action

Description

At the top of the right panel, the expandable tab containing the Terraform action buttons is termed the One-action tab.

One action is a quick way to execute a Terraform action without triggering the pipeline.

Terraform Actions

1. Validate: This executes terraform validate on the generated code and gives you the output.

2. Plan: It performs terraform plan on the generated code and gives you the output.

3. Apply: It runs terraform apply -auto-approve on the generated code and gives you the output.

4. Destroy: It performs terraform destroy -auto-approve on the generated code and gives you the output.

Before doing any action, Brainboard sets this up: terraform init -input=false -upgrade=true

This is to make sure everything is set up correctly before launching the execution of the action.

This is useful when building infrastructure to quickly launch a plan or run validation checks to ensure the code is valid and preview the changes that will be introduced. That’s why it is located next to your design.

How it works

When you trigger an action in one-action tab, Brainboard:

• creates an ephemeral execution environment,

• executes the action, and

• streamlines the output in real time.

Time stamp: You can also find the timestamp in the bottom-right corner. It is displayed in the UTC timezone to indicate when the action was performed.

This execution will also be logged in the pipeline history, so you can visualize it at any time. It is named “One Action pipeline” in the workflow column.

Stop the execution

When there is an ongoing execution, you can stop it by clicking on the Stop button located in the top-right corner of the output.

You can also stop the execution from the pipeline view

When you stop an ongoing apply or destroy, Brainboard attempts to gracefully shutdown the execution process, but in some rare cases, the Terraform state may get corrupted. If you encounter this situation, reach out to our support by clicking the Help icon in the top right corner of your Brainboard dashboard.

Targeting

Brainboard allows you to execute an action on a specific resource. For example, you want to destroy a specific resource(s) on an already deployed architecture without impacting the whole infrastructure.

To achieve this, type the resource address in the menu or select it from the dropdown menu, then click any action.

Refer to this documentation page to understand how resource targeting works in Terraform.

Output

Brainboard provides real-time output of the current execution.

When you first open the one-action tab, Brainboard displays the output of the last execution.

This output is shared for all users who have access to the architecture, as it is important to know what happened during the last execution when you are about to make new changes.

Best practices

When you are building a cloud architecture, it's advised to do plan frequently to catch errors at an early stage and fix them.