policy = null does not remove existing resource policy

[tekumara]

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Terraform CLI and Terraform AWS Provider Version

Terraform v1.0.10
on darwin_amd64

• provider registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws v3.63.0

Affected Resource(s)

• aws_secretsmanager_secret

Terraform Configuration Files

terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {}
  }
}

Debug Output

Panic Output

Expected Behavior

When policy = null any existing resource policy should be removed.

Actual Behavior

The existing resource policy remained.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Apply the following

resource "aws_secretsmanager_secret" "password" {
  name        = "alice"

  policy = jsonencode({
    Version = "2012-10-17"
    Statement = [
      {
        Sid    = "SecretReader"
        Effect = "Allow"
        Principal = {
          AWS = "*"
        }
        Action = [
          "secretsmanager:GetSecretValue"
        ]
        Resource = "*"
      }
    ] }
  )

  // force delete, so we can recreate the secret immediately if needed
  recovery_window_in_days = 0
}

The above will correctly apply the resource policy.

2. Change to policy = null

3. Reapply.

The existing policy is not removed.

[YakDriver]

The behavior you are seeing is as designed when an argument is computed. Blanking it out is basically seen as "I don't want to fill this out, read the value from AWS." Because of aws_secretsmanager_secret_policy, this must be computed or anyone using that resource and this one would get perpetual diffs.

However, #22217 allows you to clear the policy by setting it to "{}" (i.e., policy = "{}").

[github-actions]

This functionality has been released in v3.70.0 of the Terraform AWS Provider. Please see the Terraform documentation on provider versioning or reach out if you need any assistance upgrading.

For further feature requests or bug reports with this functionality, please create a new GitHub issue following the template. Thank you!

[github-actions]

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