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The rule ID changes when I modify a rule

For cloudflare_ruleset resources, the Cloudflare provider may delete a rule and create a new one when you modify a ruleset rule in your Terraform configuration. This happens when the provider cannot match your new rule configuration in Terraform with an existing rule in your Cloudflare configuration. In this situation, modifying a rule in your Terraform configuration and applying the changes will create a new rule with a different rule ID in your Cloudflare account or zone.

This behavior may have an impact on any automation or monitoring systems you may have configured that rely on having immutable rule IDs between rule modifications.

How to keep the same rule ID between modifications

To keep the existing rule ID when making changes to a rule through Terraform, add a ref field to the rule.

The ref field is a user-defined external identifier that must be unique for each rule in a ruleset. When you provide a ref value, the provider will match the rule in your updated Terraform configuration with the existing rule with the same ref external identifier, and the rule ID will be preserved.

ref values have a string data type with a minimum length of one character. For example, my_ref.

cf-terraforming support for ref field values

By default, when you create a rule, its ref value will be equal to the rule ID. You can set or modify ref values via Cloudflare API.

When you import your existing Cloudflare configuration to Terraform using cf-terraforming, the generated Terraform configuration will have ref values for each rule, with the same value as the rule ID.

If you manually created your Terraform configuration and your rules' configuration does not have a ref field, add a ref field to each rule so that each rule modification does not generate a new rule ID.