Terraform Create Multiple Resources Without Duplicate Resource Names

Question

I'm trying to use Terraform to create a number of GitHub repositories. I have the following:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    github = {
      source  = "integrations/github"
      version = "~> 4.0"
    }
  }
}

# Configure the GitHub Provider
provider "github" {
    token = var.gitub_token
}

# Create the repo
resource "github_repository" "new_repo" {
  name        = var.repo_name
  visibility = "public"
}

This worked perfectly the first time. The 2nd time I run it, with a different repo_name, though, rather than create a new repo, it's trying to modify the 1st one. That seems to be because of the new_repo resource name. I don't want to have to edit that every time though?

I just want a single .tf I can run whenever I want a new repo. How can I do that with multiple resource names?

Answer 1

This happens because you keep modify the same instance of github_repository.new_repo. If you really don't want to separate the projects into different folders, you could use workspaces, or use for_each or count where repo_name would be a list. For example:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    github = {
      source  = "integrations/github"
      version = "~> 4.0"
    }
  }
}

variable "repo_name" {
    default = ["name1", "name2", "name3"]
}

# Configure the GitHub Provider
provider "github" {
    token = var.gitub_token
}

# Create the repo
resource "github_repository" "new_repo" {
  for_each   = toset(var.repo_name)  
  name       = each.key
  visibility = "public"
}

This way when ever you add new repo, or remove it, you have to update the var.repo_name.