[bchallenor]

`terraform state mv` is indeed the trick. It took me a while to understand it, but this blog post helped. [1] It leads you through refactoring some resources into a module.

The key takeaway for me was "we really only need to consider the nodes that map to the physical resources of our infrastructure when we are planning our state surgery. This means we can ignore all of the nodes that correspond to data sources, variables, and providers."

So after a refactor, this is what I do now: (1) run plan to get the names of everything terraform wants to delete and recreate; (2) pair all the resource nodes manually and translate them to state mv commands; (3) re-run plan and verify that terraform is now convinced there is nothing to do.

It would be nice if terraform could do this for me, of course, but I find that it is generally possible to avoid delete and recreate if all I've done is a refactoring.

[1] https://ryaneschinger.com/blog/terraform-state-move/