Provider Ephemeral Resources

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 (opens in a new tab).

When to Use One

Ephemeral results can be used in provider configuration, write-only attributes, provisioner configuration, and other ephemeral contexts — but not in regular attributes, because those persist to state.

Lifecycle

Terraform calls up to three methods per operation:

• Open (required) — fetch or create the value; runs during plan and/or apply whenever the result is needed. There is no state to refresh and nothing to import.
• Renew (optional) — called when the wall clock passes the RenewAt returned by Open/Renew, for values that expire while Terraform is still running. Renew cannot return a new result — it can only extend/refresh what Open produced (e.g. re-lease the same credential); if the value itself changes on renewal, the API is not renewable in this sense and Open must return a longer-lived value.
• Close (optional) — called when Terraform is done with the value; revoke leases or delete temporary credentials here.

Open can pass bytes forward via resp.Private; Renew and Close receive them — use this for lease IDs needed to renew/revoke.

Implementation

Configure follows the same ProviderData-cast pattern as resources (the provider-resources skill, if available, shows it); the client comes from resp.EphemeralResourceData set in the provider’s Configure.

Registration

The provider opts in via provider.ProviderWithEphemeralResources:

var _ provider.ProviderWithEphemeralResources = &examplecloudProvider{}

func (p *examplecloudProvider) EphemeralResources(_ context.Context) []func() ephemeral.EphemeralResource {
    return []func() ephemeral.EphemeralResource{

Set resp.EphemeralResourceData = client in the provider’s Configure alongside ResourceData/DataSourceData.

Design Rules

• Never log the value, never put it in a diagnostic. The whole point is non-persistence; an error message containing the token defeats it.
• Mark the secret attribute Sensitive: true anyway — it guards rendering in the ephemeral value’s own lifecycle output.
• No plan modifiers, no import, no id convention — there is no state for any of them to act on.
• Schema inputs follow the same rules as data source arguments; expose the API’s identifiers (role_name), not invented ones.
• Set RenewAt with a safety margin before the real expiry; Terraform renews lazily, not on a precise timer.
• If the upstream value cannot be revoked, skip Close rather than implementing a no-op that suggests revocation happens.

Testing

Ephemeral results never reach state, so tests assert them indirectly — the standard pattern echoes the ephemeral value through the echoprovider into a regular resource the test can inspect. Minimum coverage: a basic open-and-use test and per-attribute tests alongside required fields. Use the provider-test-patterns skill (if available) — its ephemeral testing reference covers the echoprovider setup, version gating (tfversion.SkipBelow(tfversion.Version1_10_0)), and multi-step patterns.

Documentation

Registry docs live at docs/ephemeral-resources/<name>.md, generated by tfplugindocs like every other page type. Use the provider-docs skill (if available) for the workflow; document the renewal/revocation behavior explicitly — users need to know whether closing their Terraform run revokes the credential.

Checklist

• Not done: Value genuinely must not persist (otherwise a data source is simpler)
• Not done: Open implemented; Renew/Close only where the API supports them
• Not done: Secret attributes Sensitive: true; value never logged or in diagnostics
• Not done: Lease/handle passed via Private, not via the result
• Not done: RenewAt set with margin for expiring credentials
• Not done: Registered in EphemeralResources(); EphemeralResourceData set in provider Configure
• Not done: Echo-provider acceptance tests, version-gated to Terraform >= 1.10
• Not done: Docs page explains lifetime, renewal, and revocation behavior