provider-ephemeral-resources
Installation
SKILL.md
Terraform Provider Ephemeral Resources
Ephemeral resources (Terraform 1.10+) produce values that are never persisted to state or plan. They exist for exactly one job: handing secrets — tokens, generated passwords, short-lived certificates, decrypted values — to the parts of a configuration that need them, without writing them to disk. Any data source that returns a sensitive value is a candidate to be (or to also exist as) an ephemeral resource.
Official docs: Ephemeral Resources.
When to Use One
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Read-only lookup of non-sensitive data | Data source |
| Value is sensitive and only needed at apply time (DB password for a provider block, token for a write-only attribute) | Ephemeral resource |
| Sensitive value that downstream managed resources must store (e.g. as an attribute) | Regular resource/data source — but pair with write-only attributes where possible |
| Credential that expires mid-operation (STS-style tokens, short-TTL leases) | Ephemeral resource with Renew |