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Create Stacks ​

On this page, you will learn how to create stacks with Terramate CLI.

Create a new stack with the CLI ​

Stacks can be created with the terramate create command.

sh
terramate create <directory>

This command will create a directory and add a stack.tm.hcl file that contains the configuration for your stack adding the directory basename as name and description and creating a UUIDv4 as id that needs to be unique within the current repository and identifying the stack in Terramate Cloud if connected.

You can set a stack's metadata like its name, and description, add tags, and configure the orchestration behavior upon stack creation.

The following example:

sh
terramate create \
  stacks/vpc \
  --name "Main VPC" \
  --description "Stack to manage the main VPC"

will create a stack with the following configuration:

hcl
# ./stacks/vpc/stack.tm.hcl
stack {
  name        = "My first stack"
  description = "Stack to manage the main VPC"
  id          = "3271f37c-0e08-4b59-b205-1ee61082ff26"
}

TIP

It is recommended to never change a stack's id once committed to allow tracking of the stack when refactoring the directory hierarchy.

Terramate detects stacks based on the existence of a stack {} block. The name of the file is not important and can be different from stack.tm.hcl. There can be exactly one stack block defined in a stack.

Code Generation ​

Upon creation of a stack, code generation will be triggered so that the new stack can be initialized with a default configuration if desired. This is especially helpful when you want to generate required configurations such as Terraform provider and backend configuration.

You can disable code generation upon stack creation by passing the --no-generate flag, e.g. terramate create some-stack --no-generate.

Import existing stacks ​

Terramate can detect and import various existing configurations.