Null Is Not Nothing

in

writing

date

4/21/2024

Null is not nothing.

It’s a value type¹ in Terraform who’s never invited to the party but always seems to show up. Instead, I would encourage you to start inviting them, to the module party.

Null is not nothing, it is a value that represent the absence of a value. Making it the perfect default value for your input variables.

When an input variable of your module isn’t set, Terraform will fall back on the provider’s default for that optional² attribute, or the upstream API’s default, if one exists.

Any default³ value for an input variable, other than null, is a value you have to maintain.

variable "example" {
  type    = string
  default = null
}

👟 Footnotes