Listing Resources and Data Sources From a Terraform Provider

For scripting, automation, or simply to explore what’s available, it’s incredibly useful to have a complete list of all the resources and data sources that a Terraform provider offers. I learned that you can generate this list directly from the Terraform CLI with a little help from the command-line JSON processor, jq.

Setup

First, you need an initialized Terraform directory with the provider you want to inspect. This allows Terraform to load the provider’s schema, which contains all the information we need.

1. Create a main.tf file with the provider definition. You don’t need any other configuration.

   hcl code snippet start

   terraform {
     required_providers {
       aws = {
         source  = "hashicorp/aws"
         version = "~> 5.100.0"
       }
     }
   }

   hcl code snippet end

2. Initialize Terraform in that directory.

   shell code snippet start

   terraform init

   shell code snippet end

Listing Resources and Data Sources

With the provider initialized, you can now dump its schema as JSON and use jq to parse it.

Resources

terraform providers schema -json | jq -r '.provider_schemas."registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws".resource_schemas | keys[]'

Data Sources

The command is almost identical, you just need to change resource_schemas to data_source_schemas.

terraform providers schema -json | jq -r '.provider_schemas."registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws".data_source_schemas | keys[]'

You can easily adapt this for any provider by changing the path "registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws" to match the provider you are inspecting.