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Resource Persistence

Coder templates have full control over workspace ephemerality. In a completely ephemeral workspace, there are zero resources in the Off state. In a completely persistent workspace, there is no difference between the Off and On states.

Most workspaces fall somewhere in the middle, persisting user data such as filesystem volumes, but deleting expensive, reproducible resources such as compute instances.

By default, all Coder resources are persistent, but production templates must employ the practices laid out in this document to prevent accidental deletion.

Disabling Persistence

The coder_workspace data source exposes the start_count = [0 | 1] attribute that other resources reference to become ephemeral.

For example:

data "coder_workspace" "me" {
}

resource "docker_container" "workspace" {
  # When `start_count` is 0, `count` is 0, so no `docker_container` is created.
  count = data.coder_workspace.me.start_count # 0 (stopped), 1 (started)
  # ... other config
}

⚠️ Persistence Pitfalls

Take this example resource:

data "coder_workspace" "me" {
}

resource "docker_volume" "home_volume" {
  name = "coder-${data.coder_workspace.me.owner}-home"
}

Because we depend on coder_workspace.me.owner, if the owner changes their username, Terraform would recreate the volume (wiping its data!) the next time the workspace restarts.

Therefore, persistent resource names must only depend on immutable IDs such as:

coder_workspace.me.owner_id
coder_workspace.me.id

data "coder_workspace" "me" {
}

resource "docker_volume" "home_volume" {
  # This volume will survive until the Workspace is deleted or the template
  # admin changes this resource block.
  name = "coder-${data.coder_workspace.id}-home"
}

🛡 Bulletproofing

Even if our persistent resource depends exclusively on static IDs, a change to the name format or other attributes would cause Terraform to rebuild the resource.

Prevent Terraform from recreating the resource under any circumstance by setting the ignore_changes = all directive in the lifecycle block.

data "coder_workspace" "me" {
}

resource "docker_volume" "home_volume" {
  # This resource will survive until either the entire block is deleted
  # or the workspace is.
  name = "coder-${data.coder_workspace.me.id}-home"
  lifecycle {
    ignore_changes = all
  }
}

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