Terraform Plan Viewer
Paste terraform plan output to see color-coded resource changes. Additions in green, deletions in red, modifications in yellow. Makes PR reviews much easier.
terraform plan and copy the outputWhat is a Terraform Plan Viewer?
A Terraform plan viewer takes the raw text output of terraform plan and renders it with color-coded syntax highlighting, making it far easier to scan for additions, changes and — most importantly — deletions before you commit to applying. The standard terminal output is functional but dense: green plus signs, red minus signs and amber tildes scroll past quickly, and it's easy to miss a destructive change hidden in a wall of text. A dedicated viewer slows you down in the right way.
Reviewing infrastructure changes carefully before applying is one of the highest-leverage habits in DevOps. A missed deletion of an RDS instance or a security group rule that gets replaced instead of modified can cause a production outage or permanent data loss. This tool is designed to make the review step feel faster and more visual, so engineers actually do it thoroughly rather than skimming and clicking Apply.
When to Use This Tool
- Pre-apply review: Paste plan output before every
terraform applyto catch unintended resource replacements or deletions before they happen. - Pull request review: Share the colored output with your team in a PR comment to make infrastructure changes legible to reviewers who may not run Terraform locally.
- Incident investigation: If a recent apply caused an issue, paste the plan to reconstruct exactly what changed and in what order.
- Onboarding: Help new engineers understand what a Terraform plan means by walking them through a color-coded example rather than raw terminal text.
How It Works
The viewer parses the standard text format produced by terraform plan (the human-readable output, not the binary -out file). It identifies lines by their prefix character: + for additions (green), - for deletions (red), ~ for in-place modifications (amber) and # for resource block headers (blue). It also extracts the final summary line — "Plan: N to add, N to change, N to destroy" — and displays it as a stat bar at the top for an at-a-glance overview.
Frequently Asked Questions
What terraform plan output format is supported?
The tool parses the standard human-readable text output produced when you run terraform plan in your terminal. This is the default output format with +, - and ~ prefix characters. It does not parse the binary plan file produced by terraform plan -out=tfplan, nor the JSON output from terraform show -json tfplan. Simply run terraform plan without flags, copy the output and paste it here.
How do I safely review and apply a Terraform plan?
The safest workflow is to run terraform plan -out=tfplan to save the exact plan to a file, review the output in this viewer, and then apply that saved plan with terraform apply tfplan. Applying the saved plan guarantees you apply exactly what you reviewed — not a new plan that may have drifted because someone else made a change in the same time window. Never run terraform apply without reviewing a plan first.
What should I watch for before applying?
Focus first on any lines marked - (deletion) or -/+ (destroy and recreate), especially for stateful or long-lived resources: RDS instances, S3 buckets, IAM roles, KMS keys, VPCs and load balancers. A destroy-and-recreate on a database means data loss unless you have a current snapshot. Also verify that security group rules being replaced are accurate — a gap in firewall rules during recreation can briefly expose a service. When in doubt, use lifecycle { prevent_destroy = true } in your Terraform config for critical resources.